For the last few months there's been a German intern working for us just outside my office. He goes back to university to finish his studies tomorrow and so we're giving him a drink or two this evening to say thanks for all the good work he's done and for being so understanding of our strange British ways. As I was leaving the office yesterday evening he asked whether the drinks would still be on if England lost yesterday's friendly soccer game. Of course the drinks are on and of course England lost. Anglo-German soccer relations have been normalised since that great game in 2001. I see that Brown and Merkel were at the game. What was their score?

But it's good to see that the BBC have given headline space to Christian Schweiger's Britain, Germany and the Future of the European Union which we published late last year and which argues that our two countries are the ideal partners in Europe (although I think the natural German assumption that the EU is a good thing in itself is not so widely held in Britain).

I was disappointed that yesterday's blog about Amazon's new initiative CreateSpace generated only two comments so far - it's not too late. I'll be interested to see how this all develops. I wonder how author-friendly the Amazon contract is. I wonder what will happen when one of on-demand authors is sued for libel. I wonder what will happen if one of the books is a pirate edition. I wonder where the quality control will come from. Perhaps someone at Amazon/CreateSpace would like to address these issues.

Although it's August and Britain tends to go on holiday there is still plenty of activity at Macmillan. Yesterday we announced our intention to acquire Frank Brothers in Delhi. Together with our existing businesses this will make Macmillan the number one educational publisher in India and underscores our commitment to education and business there.

Once upon a time, when I was a medical editor at Oxford University Press (incidentally did anyone else notice this rather intriguing headline Oxford Publishing Sold last week?) I came across an internal memo from earlier days saying something like 'since Blackwell's have failed to achieve higher discounts from scientific and medical publishers they have decided to go into publishing themselves'. This signalled the foundation of Blackwell Scientific Publishing which, after various mergers and acquisitions, was sold last year for £600m, many many times more valuable than the wonderful bookshop which spawned it.

The concern at the time was that Blackwell would favour their own publications when it came to retailing, thus disadvantaging other publishers. I don't think this ever happened and in any event the Blackwell shop was never a dominant part of the overall market for scientific or medical books.

However, I was reminded of this by an announcement from Amazon yesterday. I urge you to follow this link to a blog by Timo Hannay commenting on the announcement. Please read his thoughts, read the press release from Amazon's CreateSpace, read Timo's piece again. Sit down and think about it from a book publisher's point of view. Is Timo right? Could Amazon succeed where Blackwell were only partly succesful (albeit £600m richer)? Interesting times.

On a lighter note I was at a meeting yesterday which included a number of academics. One of them reminded me of a marvellous quote which he attributed to C.P.Snow but which appears to belong to Henry Kissinger. Either way, it's a great quote and applicable to many situations:

'University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.'

The stakes in the publishing business right now are not small, so let's hope the politics are therefore not vicious.

I see that Tony Blair has appointed the hotshot Washington lawyer, Bob Barnett, to get a deal for his memoirs. There is little doubt that this will be an important and big-selling book and that the forthcoming auction will be interesting, to say the least.

There are many variables and imponderables in calculating what advance to offer. When will the book be published? How good will it be? How revealing or otherwise? How much would a newspaper pay for serialization? What might be the scope and size of translation rights? How well might the book sell in the UK and USA? How much would the publisher have to set aside for security and management diversion?

As an aid to all the publishers who might be bidding can I invite you to suggest:

1. How much should be the top offer for world rights?

2. How much will be the top offer for world rights?

3. Which publisher will triumph?

Over to you.

And here is a link to an amazing tribute to Bill Deedes.

There is a school of thought (particularly prevalent in the UK) which says that 'educated' people must be able to discuss literature and politics (and maybe business, wine, food, sport etc). Equally however, it is considered quite cool (or certainly not shocking) to claim almost total ignorance of science. 'Popular science' is frequently a contradiction in terms.

Of course, issues like climate change, the Internet, genetic engineering, and health issues have started to make basic scientific understanding a 'must' but the level of discussion among even 'well-educated' people is pretty embarrassingly poor.

Macmillan Science has published some great books trying to address this. The latest is Ten Questions Science Can't Answer (Yet) by Michael Hanlon.

Books like this make a difference but in addition I'd like to point you to News at Nature. Without any dumbing down, this site allows non-scientists to discover what's happening at the cutting edge of research. It is really the most authoritative and accessible source of scientific news and fulfils the first part of Nature's two-pronged mission 'to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life'. This comes from the first page of the first issue in 1869. A more recent mission statement can be found here although an editorial about it has started a bit of a flurry in the blogosphere (which incorrectly is commenting about an amended version of the 1869 statement - oh what fun we have):

First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.

One of the most difficult parts of being part of a very international business is trying to be aware of the problems affecting each of our businesses, both commercial and environmental. Clearly on September 11, 2001 everyone rushed to establish whether their colleagues, friends and family were safe. It becomes harder when the disaster is less globally newsworthy or in a more distant culture or geography. The earthquake in Peru is an example. We have a small but hugely committed Macmillan Education business in Lima. Thank goodness all our team are safe but of course they all know people caught up in the tragedy and the after effects could be as bad as the disaster itself.

Obituaries of Bill Deedes are still flying off the presses. I particularly liked this tribute by Alan Watkins in today's Independent on Sunday where he quotes the wonderful Deedesian mixed metaphor: 'You can't make an omelette without frying eggs.' I couldn't agree more.

One of Macmillan's most loyal and most entertaining authors, Bill Deedes, died yesterday. For more about him just follow this link to today's vast number of news stories. Even better, sample one of his books the most recent of which has just come out in paperback with the author aged 94.

While being distracted by old issues of Macmillan News the other day this came up as the banner illustration.

Macmillan's former Chairman is pretty recognisable but I wonder how many people now recognise the other guy. I'm pretty sure that it's Clive Sinclair the British inventor. I think he's demonstrating one of his ZX Spectrum computers for use in schools back in the early 1980s. Clearly the digital revolution began early at Macmillan.

Two links for those interested in the future of educational publishing. University Publishing in a Digital Age is a report written by an old friend and former head of Oxford University Press USA, Laura Brown, principally about the university press sector in the America. It's a strange thing but, whilst British university presses are among the most successful and vibrant publishers in the world, their American equivalents by and large are tiny and very traditional. I think this is because the Britsh ones (OUP in particular) have been forced to stand on their own feet by virtue of the relative poverty of their owners. The American ones have traditionally received some form of support from their very wealthy owners. Subsidies don't work. Anyway, Laura's report is an excellent overview and it's well worth reading the conclusions and summaries if not the whole very long thing.

The second link is to a very basic and almost empty landing page for CourseSmart. The reason for mentioning it is that it is a very rare beast - an alliance of publishers working together to find solutions to the delivery of digital information to students. I wonder whether there should be similar initiatives elsewhere in the world...

From time to time, somebody asks me how on earth or why on earth we published a particular book. The easy thing to say is that I wasn't involved in the decision (which is true in 99% of cases) but that feels like a cop out. Ultimately, if the book carries the Macmillan or Picador (or whatever imprint) name I am responsible to some degree. I try to explain that it seems to me that there are three main criteria for deciding whether to publish a particular book, in no particular order;

It is a good book - well-written, accurate, timely etc;

It is by an author whose career we want to be associated with in the long term;

It might make money.

I don't think all three criteria have to be fulfilled on every occasion but it's usually a good idea if two of them are. I believe the bulk of what we publish passes this test. If none is fulfilled by a particular book, then the only response to a complainant is 'we got it wrong.'

What I hope we never do is make editorial decisions based on internal prejudices. There is a row brewing in the USA as described in this New York Times article. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month. The article from which it was derived which describes how the Jewish lobby effectively controls US policy was attacked for implied anti-semitism but the team at FSG clearly think the book is important and defensible irrespective of criticism. And all power to their elbow.

Meanwhile, just a few blocks away from FSG (Union Square, New York City), the team at Palgrave Macmillan USA (Flatiron Building) are preparing for the publication of The Deadliest Lies: the Israel lobby and the myth of Jewish control which argues just the opposite as described in the NYT article.

I have no doubt that there are many people who think that one or other of these books should not have been published. Personally, I think they both fulfil all three criteria and I am proud that they are both published by companies within the Holtzbrinck Group of which Macmillan is a part. Freedom to express opinions, however controversial, is part of our role as publishers.

I am indebted to the Pan Macmillan internal blog, The Digitalist, for this link to a site about the future of education. I'd recommend that you switch off the sound unless you're into meaningless electronic musical drivel but the graphics are terrific and the messages clear.

I'm off to a meeting right now but will later today add a spot of nostalgia.

And the nostalgia comes courtesy of Alysoun Sanders who runs the Macmillan Archive in Basingstoke. If you take the trouble to checck out the links you'll also be introduced to the riches of the old newsletters which are a treasure house for historians of publishing.

Macmillan’s involvement in India from pre-Independence days to the 1990s can be found in articles that appeared in Macmillan News, the company newsletter that ran for 30 years from 1961.

At the time of independence Macmillan had 3 branches in India based in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. K R Clemens Manager of the Calcutta branch, worked in India during the three and a half decades that bridged the last years of British India “with its endeavours and its last vestiges of pomp and circumstance, and the first twenty years of the independent Republic of India” and succeeded C A Parkhouse who had been in India with Macmillan since 1913. Clemens saw changes, which were “great and far-reaching” calling for “constant adjustments”. On his retirement in 1968 he commended “the co-operative effort that has always existed” within the company. 

David Green who succeeded  Mr Stagg as Manager of the Madras (Chennai) branch also tells his story of post-independence publishing and the growth of local publishing and nationalisation of school textbooks and the opening of showrooms in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Trichinopoly and Rivandrum. The “Stories to Remember” series that began in 1954 are still on the Macmillan Education list.

In January 1970 the newly formed public company, Macmillan Company of India Ltd with its headquarters in Chennai took over the role of the 3 branches and in 1972 the main offices were moved to Delhi.

By 1979 the process of indianisation was fully implemented and the company has continued to grow and to expand into areas that were never envisaged by Alexander Macmillan when he first embarked on plans to publish a series of books especially for India more than 140 years ago in the 1860s.