It's exactly one year to the day since the launch of Staff Room, the subscription-funded part of the world's largest ELT website, onestopenglish which has more than 400,000 registrants. Most of the subscribers are teachers of English as a foreign or second language and they come from every part of the world with Germany and Mexico leading the way. The testimonials for the service are glowing and, unlike many web propositions, people are willing to pay for the content. But the Staff Room is just the most recent development of onestopenglish which was launched in May 2001.

Here is the birthday cake in the real world.

For a flavour of onestop try this trailer to The Road Less Travelled, a soap opera for learners of English. Whatever next?

You may remember a post about the scifoo camp at the beginning of August. There were many distinguished participants from the world of science but here is evidence that it wasn't just a bunch of nerds. The guy on the left is Phil Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature. Next to him his personal adviser on home improvements.

And here's a link for lovers of nature and the underdog.

I spent some time over the weekend reading Inside the Googleplex in this week's Economist. It gives a fascinating insight into the workings of and issues facing the 21st century's commercial giant. In the editorial, the conclusion is:

'One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google's trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool —and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.'

I could not agree more.

Having digested the Google stuff I then moved through the rest of the issue and realised (for the umpteenth time) that this magazine must be the best weekly print publication in the world for the general reader and we all know that Nature is clearly the best for the scientific reader. Both these magazines have British roots but both have adapted to become genuinely global. I suspect they do more for British prestige around the world than almost anything else, including hugely expensive prime ministerial visits. Hooray for British journalistic standards.

And now the Economist Group is launching a new quarterly sister magazine called Intelligent Life. You can find out more about it here. If it's as good as its sibling, it will surely be a huge success.

This interview with Pete Yarrow, co-writer of Puff and co-author of Puff,the Magic Dragon book which we've just published took me straight back to 1963. I couldn't find an original version so here is a much more recent performance

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

I was at a boarding school with little heating and little entertainment bar sport. The highlight of the week was the Sunday afternoon singles chart lists on the radio. The Beatles were riding high, Presley released Devil in Disguise, Gerry and the Pacemakers released the best-ever football anthem You'll Never Walk Alone and who could forget Brian Poole and the Tremeloes and Do You Love Me? (now that I can dance)? In the middle of all this edgy stuff came the sweetest little song from a clean-cut American folk trio.

I'll bet that as soon as you saw the title of this blog you started to hum the tune in your head. I also bet that most of you never knew how to spell Honah Lee - and what on earth is it? Buy the book (and CD) and find out.

Finally, just in case you missed this wonderful advertisement for Western education...

The posting on author royalties continues to generate interesting comments but perhaps the most challenging response comes from Evan Schnittman on the excellent OUPblog. He argues for a single payment for all standard publishing rights in a title for a defined period - and then spoils the purity of his propsal by introducing 'kickers' for higher than anticipated sales, which is a royalty by any other name, but let that pass. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says but his penultimate paragraph bears reading:

'The state of book publishing requires a radical change to the standard business practices that have existed for decades. This has to happen from within the core assumptions of the most basic elements of the business. Retail price vs. gross earnings are just window dressing on the real problems of trade publishing.'

The author of Typo, David Silverman has uploaded a video about booking a hotel room - it's a joy.

It's the first day of September which means Autumn is with us. It also means I have to compile the monthly statisitics for this blog. August was a relatively quiet month (unsurprisingly) with 77284 visits against 84682 in July but 80% up on August 2006's 42944. It brings the total visits to the site to over the million at 1,068,510.

Yesterday's posting about royalties has generated some really interesting comments, largely from the USA. Do check them out and join the debate.

I wrote about Oliver Morton's new book a couple of days ago and invited him to contribute a guest blog here. Being the journalistic professional he is, it arrived on deadline and here it is:

'I don’t know much about book festivals, but you don’t have to know much to be knocked out by the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which closed on Monday night. I’d been there before a few years ago, for an on-stage interview with Jim Lovelock that was a sold-out success, and this time I was there to plug my own book, Eating the Sun, at two events. But the thing that struck me, both times, was the enthusiasm of both organisers and punters, the stunning number of people and topics that they manage to get into 17 days (700 events, 650 authors, pdf programme) – and the stamina that those 17 days must require. Organiser Catherine Lockerbie, who has that stamina in spades, found time to give the Daily Telegraph a taste of what the weeks are like.

 

Good things: endlessly friendly and helpful staff; generous sponsorship in kind (and doubtless otherwise) from Highland Park, which may not be “the best spirit in the world” (among other things, forget not the Ott) but which is undeniably wonderful; a terrific bookshop; excellent chairs at the events who knew their stuff and worked hard to do their best by the speakers and by the audience; Carol Ann Duffy’s closing poetry recital; my co-presenters Martyn Amos and Nick Harberd; bumping into Ken Macleod (great short story published in Nature|recent Nature feature, both subscribers only); speaking in the Spiegeltent, which had a really great vibe to it – much more Moulin Rouge than the venue for your average talk on “The future of nature”; pretty much everything else.

 

Bad things: not being able to go to all of it; one slightly underlit lectern; err … that’s it.'

 

Guest blogging at Richard’s kind invitation; cross-posted at my own blog Heliophage. And this is a photo taken not in Edinburgh.

We've just completed our annual IT strategy day which is becoming an ever more important prelude to the budget round which follows. One of the issues is how to simplify our royalty system without compromising its accuracy and reliablity.

At one point in my career the royalty system being used didn't work properly. The angst, fury, management time, author damage and cost were staggering and I never want to suffer that again.

The problem is that the concept of royalties is a fair one but that the changes in our business have made it, in its present form (a percentage of the UK published price of a book), unwieldy and unrealistic.

The percentage is linked to a price which applies in only a minority of cases. It doesn't apply to all sales overseas; it doesn't apply to nearly all sales made in supermarkets, Internet bookshops and many bookshop chains.

In educational and academic publishing houses the system has been radically simplified by the almost universal application of royalties based on publishers' gross income rather than retail price.

However, literary agents and many authors' organisations have set themselves against this because they fear that somehow a change would work against authors' interests. I don't think there is anything to fear and there is an enormous amount to be gained from the simplification, transparency, auditability, and shared motivation to reduce average discounts to retailers. How about agreeing new equitable royalty rates based on real money not a notional recommended retail price? 

 

He's done it again, this time Cormac has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road. What I really hope is that this leads to a greater readership for all his books. Here are two.

Moving on from the successful to the not so successful, I am immensely grateful to Danuta Kean for this helpful link on how to cope with rejection while maintaining dignity and courtesy.

I am very pleased to see that a poll in today's Bookseller on 'Who should run the library service?' has Tim Coates way out in front with 52% of the votes, followed a long way back by local authorities(21%), librarians (13%), the Government (11%) and the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the quango charged with leading the transformation of the library service) in last place with not a single vote. Not a resounding vote of confidence in the responsible institution.

And finally a plug for a book published not by Macmillan but written by a Macmillan employee. It is Eating the Sun: How plants power the planet by Oliver Morton who is the Chief News and Features Editor at Nature. I'm not sure how it's come about that he's being published by HarperCollins under the Fourth Estate imprint rather than by Macmillan Science but I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles and a good book is being published by a good publisher. Give it a go. It's a fascinating read.

I spent part of the Bank Holiday weekend catching up on back issues of the trade press and came across this article Publishing's World Leaders in the constantly improving and Internet-friendly Publishers Weekly and co-sponsored by Livres Hebdo whose copyright this is. I have permission from them and the producer Ruediger Wischenbart and I would have put a (c) with a circle round it next to Livres Hebdo 2007 but I can't work out how to find that symbol.

I post the chart here as a reminder of the range, internationalism and relative size of the world's major publishers and to give perspective to some of the discussions on this blog.

As a follow-up to the Death of the Publisher? (I wish I'd headed it Death of a Publisher? - so much more literary) there is an excellent essay on the Exact Editions blog. Adam Hodgkin points out that these print-on-demand operations are likely to have a major democratising impact for authors which will result in millions more titles being published. I agree but the inevitable consequence of that will be the even greater need for publishers to continue to act as quality arbiters. My fear specifically about the Amazon initiative is that the huge additional numbers of unrefereed titles available for sale and promised exposure on Amazon by Amazon will obscure other potentially more relevant titles thus diminishing the customer experience. The bad will drive out the good.