This link is to an article in yesterday's New York Times. The piece is entitled 'Content makers are accused of exaggerating copyright' and is about a complaint made by the Computer and Communications Industry Asssociation to the US Federal Trade Commission. Here are the first two paragraphs of their complaint. You can read the full attack on their website home page.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) announced today that it has filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint on behalf of consumers against Major League Baseball, the National Football League, NBC/Universal and several other corporations. CCIA alleges that the named corporations have misled consumers for years, often misrepresenting their rights through deceptive and threatening statements. The complaint, part of CCIA’s newly sponsored DefendFairUse.org initiative, is aimed at exposing how media and sports organizations have systematically misled consumers with regard to their legal rights to use content, and to protect those rights in the digital age.

“Every one of us has seen or heard that copyright warning at the beginning of a sports game, DVD or book,” said Ed Black, CCIA President and CEO, during a press conference at the National Press Club. “These corporations use these warnings not to educate their consumers, but to intimidate them.”  

A glance at the association's list of members shows how powerful they might be. Clearly, the main battlegorund is video where the owners of rights to sporting events etc are getting fed up with the constant abuse of these rights and are taking legal action against the owners of youtube, for instance. This seems to be a counter-attack. However, book publishers are caught up in the row - Penguin and Harcourt.

Thankfully Macmillan has not been named and we have no need to waste money on hordes of lawyers to defend us against these absurd charges. The warnings at the front of books are the result of legal advice and are what they are - neither misleading nor intimidating. It is ridiculous to imply otherwise and the CCIA should perhaps look at the legal small print which comes attached to the software its members sell - 'people in glass houses' comes to mind.

Copyright in the Internet age is indeed a complex and challenging issue for everyone but this sort of action does nothing to help. It merely siphons money to lawyers and creates antagonism where none need exist, provided that the legitimate rights of content creators (authors in the case of publishing) are respected and valued.

Our publicity triumph of the week relates to this story about the potential for treatment of patients in a minimally conscious state. So far we've had the front pages of The Guardian and Telegraph, a big banner in the Times and articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, not to mention coverage on NBC nightly News, ABC News, the CBS Early Show and much else - not bad for 'hard science'. Of course, the story of an unconscious person 'waking' after six years is pretty amazing and newsworthy but it requires real skill to have the story reported (more or less) accurately and globally through all media. Congratulations to the whole team.

One of the best sources of news about future developments is Ray Hammond's monthly digest, Glimpses of the Future. This month's issue contains this piece (based on research originally published in Nature Neuroscience) which perhaps is relevant to my posting of yesterday about the England cricket team's fear of losing. But would Cdk5 count as performance enhancing?

A Cure For Fear

Are you afraid of fear itself? MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice.

Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory hope that their work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Inhibiting a kinase, an enzyme that change proteins, called Cdk5 facilitates the extinction of fear learned in a particular context, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and colleagues showed.

And as a follow-up to another recent posting about Alice Herz Sommer here is an interview with her which appears on the Pan Macmillan website It's not quite in the league of Mel Brooks's and Carl Reiner's 2000 year old man but what is?

What do you remember best from your childhood?

The best memory of my childhood is playing music with my brother Paul. I was not yet ten years old and he was only a little older, and evening after evening my mother said, ‘Come on children, get playing.’ She would sit down next to the stove and we’d play anything that came to our mind – Schumann most frequently, I think. We had a huge repertoire.

What is your happiest memory?

The happiest moment of my life was the birth of my son on June 21, 1937.

What is your saddest memory?

The sudden, unexpected death of my only son, Raphael, in November 2001. Living with this painful memory is a daily challenge.

What is your favourite time of day?

I think it is the morning – the three hours that I play the piano.

Where is your favourite place in the world?

My favourite place in the world is in the middle of nature - anywhere.

Don´t expect others to make you happy. Happiness does not come to you through others. You find happiness if you have a challenge in your life - and you fulfill it.

What advice would you give for a healthy old age?

Discipline! Especially if one reaches old age.   You need to be disciplined.  A routine to keep to. Time for your tasks. And time for physical exercise. Even it is just a daily walk.

Who is your favourite composer?

When I was young it was definitely Schumann. He is just adorable. Now I am older I love Beethoven and Schubert. Beethoven – because his music is deeply human and universal, and it represents endlessness. And Schubert, because his music makes you feel you are talking to God.

Do you still play the piano?

Every day! For almost 100 years.  Despite my two crippled fingers I will keep playing until my last hour.

What advice would you give a young musician today?

You've got to work with phenomenal passion, and unbelievably hard! Otherwise it comes to nothing and you won’t succeed.

India duly won the latest cricket test match against England and thus cannot lose the three-match series and have a very good chance of winning it by drawing or winning the last game. They bowled and batted very well and deserved the victory. This is the India captain, Rahul Dravid, celebrating.

The England management will have various explanations and will point to various turning points over the five days of the game. However, I think the series was forfeited by England on the mid-afternoon of the fourth day of the previous game. England had built a lead of more than 350 with their star batsman, Kevin Pietersen, with a century to his name. Instead of launching an all-out attack on India they batted sedately and unproductively for an extra hour to add a few more runs and reduce the chance of India winning. As a result they had no opportunity to bowl at India before the tea break. The forecast for the following day suggested rain. The England lead was almost impregnable. There was only one reason to bat on - the fear of losing. In the end, the rain did arrive on Monday just in time to save India. Had England not been afraid of losing they would definitely have won the game - and demoralised India and almost certainly won the series. A great example of knowing when to be brave and seize the moment. It's sad that England failed but great for India and for cricket - and I hope (but doubt) that the lesson will be learnt.

Incidentally, the same applies to publishing. Carpe diem.

It's the first of the month. In July this blog had 84682 visits, a come-down from the amazing June statistics caused by the Google heist post. However, total visits to date have reached 991,226, within spitting distance of a golden blog award.

I've had to say no to a unique launch party for a celebrity biography on Thursday (out of the country). It's unique because the average age of the invitees is somewhere in the eighties and the main tipple will be tea. And it's unique because this celebrity biography is about a not very famous person who deserves to be more famous as opposed to the normal book about a famous person who has little to say and not much talent.

The biographee is Alice Herz Sommer (do listen to this Woman's Hour interview) and the book is A Garden of Eden in Hell.

Alice was born in 1903 (work it out) and is still going strong. She suffered in a Nazi concentration camp but continued to play piano throughout the ordeal. She is still playing today and you can purchase a CD of her music from reinhard.piechocki@t.online.de .

I doubt that sales of this book will exceed those of Wayne Rooney, Jordan et al but somehow I feel it's a little more deserving.

Yesterday saw the annual Science v Nature cricket match which Nature duly won. If only the England cricket team were as reliable. Incidentally, Nature took the first three wickets with the first three balls of the Science innings. Is that one for next year's Wisden?

When I worked at Reed Elsevier we had a policy of not selling any spare capacity in our distribution business to third parties. The logic was that we shouldn't help potential competitors to grow in any way. At Macmillan, we take the completely opposite view. We are happy to see competitors grow while using our services and helping us to become more effcient too. As a result we offer all sorts of services to our competitors - typesetting and text processing, copyediting, website development, Asian print sourcing, advertisement design, sales and distribution in USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, India etc. It's a big set of businesses employing more than 4000 people worldwide and the scale we achieve from serving others as well as ourselves allows us to compete effectively with much larger publishing operations.

This is a preamble to a mini-review of one of our UK sales and distribution clients, the start-up company The Friday Project. It's been a fascinating ride for them and for us. The Pan Macmillan sales team represents their books to the trade and Macmillan Distribution services their orders.

Their strapline 'Turning the best of the web into the finest of books' is fine but it doesn't lead to commissioning focus. The catalogue is all over the place which is both its charm and its problem. The business has had its ups and downs. Good sales months followed by less good ones. Good books selling really well such as Blood, Sweat and Tea. Other good books not finding their market. But the key directors, Clare Christian and Scott Pack, have soldiered on and TFP is now a thriving publishing company with a stable workforce, a pipeline of new books, a backlist and one of the best websites (and blog sites) in the industry. I just hope that we can continue to work with them until they're big enough to kick us in the teeth and do their own thing.

Back-office support for independent publishers is not as glamorous as publishing itself but it can rewarding and companies like TFP can grow to be the likes of Quadrille or Bloomsbury. Fingers crossed for all small publishers.

Ask a typical manufacturer what his returns percentage is and he'll probably tell you his profit return on sales. Ask a publisher and he'll seethe about the perecentage of books sent back to his warehouse by retailers.

I'm not sure which publisher uttered these famous words when conducting a visitor round his warehouse and seeing a parcel of books ready for despatch:

'Gone today, here tomorrow.'

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as the who and the when. I'm not sure the official histories of publishing identify the first person to say to a bookseller:'I know you don't think you can sell a dozen but take them anyway and, if you're right, I'll take back the unsolds and give you full credit.' Whoever it was unleashed a trade practice which not only decimates publishers' and booksellers' margins but it eats up retail space, diminishes the need for buying and selling skills, and doesn't do the environment much good either.

In Australia a few years ago, several publishers introduced backlist firm sale. This seems to be working fine and there is now a movement in the UK to do the same which I applaud. I also applaud Bloomsbury's returns limit on Harry Potter.

But what saddens me is that we seem to make no progress on the total elimination of returns. One of the arguments for the abandonment of retail price maintenance was that it would allow retailers to remainder without the absurdity of sending books back to the publisher, the publisher shipping them to a remainder merchant and the bookseller then buying the books back at remainder price for sale on the 'cheap' table. I ran an experiment with Waterstone's in the early 1990s where they were granted an extra couple of points of discount in exchange for no returns (except damaged books). It worked pretty well except that change of management and ownership meant it was discontinued. Why not try it again? We have nothing to lose except tons of credit notes, complexity, carbon dioxide and lazy buyers.

It's Saturday. The sun's out here in France. England are being humiliated by India at Trent Bridge and I believe the state of terrorist alert has fallen from red to amber. Incidentally, here is the official terrorist position.

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist
threats and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved".
Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or
even "A Bit Cross". Londoners have not been "A Bit Cross" since the
blitz began in 1940 and tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have
been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance". The last
time the British issued "A Bloody Nuisance" warning level was during
the great fire of 1666.

I stop there because the rest of the joke was too anti French, German and Spanish for me to risk losing friends.

Back to cricket and Jonny Borrell. Here is the link to the teatime interview with him. I have pinched the BBC headline as the title of today's blog as an example of a contradiction in terms.

Of course, we all know that Australia rules the cricket world but I was delighted to hear that Macmillan Education Australia won both Primary Publisher of the Year and Secondary Publisher of the Year at the annual Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing in Melbourne last week.

My old friend Adam Hodgkin posed a question in a comment here which I think is worth a discussion.

I would be interested in the Macmillan view on why it has been possible to develop really excellent and profitable digital publishing for the Nature audience, and the commercial digital market still doesn't look at all convincing for trade publishing in general.

The first thing to say is that Macmillan doesn't have a view. Macmillan is made up of several thousand people all of whom have different views on more or less everything, thank goodness. This is my view.

1. Scientists are by their nature early adopters of technology and thus have had no problems moving from communicating in print to communicating digitally.

2. Scientific publishing has been intrinsically more profitable than trade book publishing. This allowed the major publishers and societies to invest the significant sums needed to create electronic delivery and storage platforms for scientific information. These platforms are a cornerstone for the creation of a new business and communication model.

3. Budgets for the acquisition of scientific information already existed and coud be readily transferred from print to digital acquisitions. These budgets were and are controlled by a professional cadre of librarians whose job is to ensure the best and most economic retrieval of information. They are the key partners to ensure highest standards.

4. The people who work in scientific publishing are by and large fascinated by the challenges of delivering often obscure information to a global audience and have embraced digital technology.

Trade book publishing has very different characteristics.

1. The general public has adopted some new technologies very quickly but to most people a book is a book - sheets of paper between covers, usable without batteries and readily portable.

2. Trade book publishing is usually a low-margin business and any spare cash has tended to be spent on investing in new authors and new marketing campaigns rather than long-term technological platforms. This is changing now with the emergence of solutions such as BookStore but this late movement hasn't helped a business model to develop.

3. Apart from the less-than-healthy public library market, there are no institutional budgets for the purchase of trade books and so no easy way of pump-priming the market.

4. The people who work in trade publishig are driven by the desire to find a great new author, to mix in the world of literature, to win literary prizes. Delivery mechanisms and complex technology are simply not high on their agendas. This is also changing but it will take time. 

And I suppose the final reason why trade books will find it harder to establish a digital model than scientific journals is that not all books are purchased simply to be read. They are purchased as gifts, as furniture, as status symbol, as insurance against boredom. None of these reasons is adequately solved by a digital version. A scientific paper is only purchased for its content.

However, none of this means we should not be investing in digital delivery of trade books. We owe it to our authors to invest in every means of finding an audience for their works. We owe it to them to hold their copyright material securely and to fight on their behalf to protect their rights. We need to serve readers in whatever way they choose. We need to work with public libraries to make digital and on-demand editions of books available through them. We need to use digital versions to promote books and to create digital libraries for research and study.

Trade books are different now but I'm convinced that the technological gap between general book publishing and scientific publishing will narrow - and the pace is gathering.

To finish today's blog on the future of books I thought I'd share a thought sent to me by an old colleague of mine in France. Apparently the most interesting analysis of publishers' and authors' rights issues and their interaction with the concepts of digital libraries, open access and public domain is to be found in the 1763 La lettre sur le commerce des livres by the always brilliant Denis Diderot. Apparently it has never been translated into English and it should be. Can anyone help?

I can't resist this quote (of no relevance whatsoever to books or publishing) from the man himself:

Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée.