Yesterday's posting about the latest Amazon initiative to offer would-be authors a print-on-demand publishing solution generated some interesting comments. Clive Keeble, in an earlier comment wrote:

'I long for the time when the entire Picador backlist is reproduced at a regular price in POD format instead of all this RPU bore : heck, then I'll even open up an account with MDL. Its up to the established publishers to ensure that they have control of the market place.'

The head of Picador, Andrew Kidd, responded:

'Regarding Picador and POD, I wholeheartedly agree. We are moving forward with digitisation of our backlist, and as costs and technologies improve it should not be long before the bad-old-days of RUC are behind us.'

Great. Print in demand is a good thing. However, Susan Hill thinks the quality isn't good enough and so dismisses it. But there is a bigger problem. Anne-Lise Pasch wrote:

'When books are no longer reprinted, do the rights return back to the Author from the Publisher? If so, wouldn't a sensible step be to retain digital rights to push onto 3rd-party services such as Amazon's POD, and thereby extend the 'shelflife' of a title from disappearing into obscurity?'

Great again. Why haven't publishers done it? Well, academic publishers have and are managing to extend the lives of scholarly monographs significantly. General book publishers have been much slower. The first and most obvious and most solvable reason for this is cost. Print on demand has been significantly more expensive than conventional printing. Expensive scholarly books can stand that extra cost and still be commercially viable. £5 paperback novels cannot. But that will change and cost will become a much less significant barrier.

The real barrier now is the publisher's relationship with authors. Ironically, there are authors (and authors' societies) who value their books going out of print because this triggers a reversion clause allowing them to annul the original publisher's contract and resell the titles to the publishing market-place. With print on demand there is no such thing as 'out of print' and thus no opportunity to revert rights. In actual fact, there are very few instances of authors benefitting from the reversion clause because usually there is a very good reason the title went out of print - there was no demand - but one can understand why an author would not want to be shackled to a publisher who cared not a jot for their books. There is a lot of noise around this issue and the various trade and author associations are trying to find a way through with little success so far. Meanwhile, technology advances and Picador still doesn't have its full backlist available using traditional AND print on demand. It is very frustrating, not just for Clive Keeble but for publishers too.

And while on Picador I was delighted to see this badly-reproduced photo. It is a spread from Grafik 150 celebrating the 150th issue of the influential design magazine of the same name.

The featured covers are from Picador proof copies. Henry Hobson has written:

'After being given one of these as a random present, I have become more and more obsessed with them. Picador's proof copies, or advance reading copies, have an understated beauty about them which you just can't find in most "designed" books....However, the main inspiration comes from the books' plainness - the empty unfinished covers can't fail to inspire. Knowing that they'll never make it onto a retailer's shelves, they feel like they've been made for my eyes only.'

I agree but wonder why we don't dispense with the designed covers and simply publish with the beautiful proof covers even if it destroys Mr Hobson's my-eyes-only reverie.

The Amazon announcement which I wrote about earlier in the week is generating a great deal of debate. Mark Thwaite, who is managing editor of The Book Depository has contributed an interesting piece with good comments to the Bookseller blog with the same title as I've used here.

I have also been granted permission to reprint an excellent article about it by Dan Penny at Outsell. The only place where I fundamentally disagree with Dan is his worked example showing that an author would earn a royalty of $12.35 on a $25 book. The truth is that a 100-page paperback work of fiction will not sell for $25. If you do the maths at a more realistic $10, the author would receive $1.85 per copy. A more typical extent for a $10 novel would be 200 pages and in this case the author would actually have to pay Amazon 15 cents a copy sold, if I understand the deal correctly.

'* Amazon has launched its CreateSpace Books on Demand service, which allows authors to upload content and publish direct. How radically might this change the publishing landscape?

Important Details: CreateSpace is Amazon's new name for CustomFlix Labs, Inc., which it acquired in 2005. The new service will compete with Print On Demand companies such as Lightning Source, Xlibris and Antony Rowe, which have agreements with many STM publishers. Amazon severed its
existing link with Lightning Source in 2006, in anticipation of this new service. However, CreateSpace is not partnering with publishers, but is instead inviting authors to contribute content directly.

CreateSpace has been offering customers single CDs and DVDs on demand since 2002, and it is envisaged that its new service will provide books in just the same way, aiming to ship books within 24 hours from when they are ordered. Customers pay the standard paperback price for a book, set by the author, with no setup fees or minimum orders. For authors, books must be uploaded to CreateSpace as PDFs, and he must then purchase and approve a proof copy of his book before titles can be produced on demand.

Amazon's share of each sale is calculated by taking a fixed charge of $3.15 per copy, plus a charge per page ($.02 per black and white page or $.12 per color page), plus a percentage of the list price (30% for sales through
Amazon.com). For example, a 100-page black and white book sold on Amazon with a list price of $25.00 would earn an author a royalty of $12.35 per sale.

Implications: Timo Hannay at Nature suggests that this announcement "may just prove to be the publishing news of the decade." By accepting content direct from authors, the traditional middle-men are excluded, mirroring online self-publishing services like Lulu and as Hannay says, opening the way for Amazon to become "the ultimate clearing house for books of all kinds (and much else besides)".

But it may be a long time until this new world becomes a reality. Certainly the advantages of CreateSpace are clear - its speed of distribution, and its low cost. Authors using the service will also see its royalty rates compare favourably to those associated with traditional publishing models.

There are also a number of challenges which Amazon faces, and perhaps the main one will be looking after its content creators. Blogs about CreateSpace have expressed  dissatisfaction with the time it takes to put uploaded content for sale on Amazon (officially, "up to 21 days", but sometimes longer), and higher profile authors will want to see a certain
level of marketing activity surrounding their book. At present, Amazon runs promotional e-mails by grouping together books that correlate according to individuals' purchasing habits. It's unclear whether CreateSpace books are to be included in these campaigns - but even if they are, authors may find
that that their books are frequently squeezed out because they lack the head of steam that traditionally published books build up through newspaper or television reviews and printed bookshop sales. It's doubtful too whether the majority of authors will be as skilled as seasoned publishing organisations at producing high-quality metadata to elevate their books in
search results listings.

This is the central question - is the CreateSpace initiative, and others like it, going to create excessive amounts of network noise that will make finding high-quality content more difficult than it is today? Searching for a book on Amazon is straightforward at the moment, but once books, journals, articles, blogs and websites merge into one big amorphous blob of information, picking out the best content will not only get more difficult, but will start to become more highly valued as a service. Online peer-ranking will be important, but this is easier to do well in vertical sectors than it is across the entire international publishing landscape. Brand and long-standing author loyalty will continue to count.

In today's Wal-Mart world there may be room for specialist shops that offer higher quality products and better service - but only for those that know their products and customers better than anyone else. Online, that's where Amazon's data advantage threatens the traditional publishing industry the
most - so that's where the battle must be fought.'

I think this is the appropriate time to mention a seminar being organised by Book Marketing (BML) on the afternoon of 21 September at the offices of DLA Piper at 3 Noble Street, London (application forms from BML and more info here) entitled provocatively 'Dinosaur or Dynamo: does the bookseller have a role in the digital era?'

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...