A dark day for England's sporting teams yesterday as Australia thrashed us at cricket and South Africa completely annihilated our rugby world cup team. It's presumably related that I woke up with the sad I think it's gonna rain today on my mind. A great song but lousy performances by the English sportsmen - and a brilliant performance by South Africa, they might just challenge New Zealand for the championship.

On a more serious note, I was delighted to see this hugely important supplement to Nature on Neglected Diseases.

I think the editor's opening paragraph sums up the issue:

"We have never had such a sophisticated arsenal of technologies for treating disease, yet the gaps in health outcomes keep getting wider. This is unacceptable." This plea to close the gap between rich and poor nations was made last month by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), in her first major address on primary health care. Few would disagree. The tragedy is that it joins a litany of similar unheeded appeals by WHO directors-general, stretching back almost 30 years."

This supplement is open-access on the web, free to all subscribers and distributed very widely beyond, thanks to its sponsors. Everyone at Macmillan - and particularly the two thirds of our people who work in developing countries - should be proud that Nature is engaging so actively in this area.

There are many types of war. Some are fought on matters of principle. Many, I suspect, are fought on matters of comfort. For the last few decades Britain has been squabbling with the Common Market, the EEC, the EC and the EU (or whatever name it wore at the time) over matters of comfort not principle. There have been victories (France and Holland voting against the constitution for instance was certainly seen as a cause for rejoicing) and setbacks (Common Agriculture Policy for instance).

This week saw a resounding victory. The European Union has given up on its efforts to force Britain to adopt the metric system universally. We can continue to buy a metre of 3 by 1 inch timber. We can continue to have cars using petrol at so many miles per litre or kilometres per gallon. We can continue to buy a pint of milk or a half of lager.

I am told that the non-fiction editorial department of Pan Macmillan had early knowledge about this decision and with enormous foresight arranged for About the size of it by Warwick Cairns to be published to coincide. As Alexander McCall Smith says about it:

'A full and convincing account of why our well-tried and trusted traditional measures make human sense'.

This is one of the many new books hitting my desk at the beginning of the Autumn season. It really feels to be an impressive list. Here are just a few of the top titles (five fiction, five non-fiction) as selected by our top salesperson. A prize for anyone who guesses the correct order by sales value as measured at the end of December.

Once upon a time I was in charge of the reference division of Oxford University Press. It was at a time when Collins had declared a 'dictionary war' to fight over market share in the UK trade market. These 'wars' broke out on a fairly regular basis and still do. Collins had many advantages. They had more clout in the trade because of their fiction and mass-market lists. They had more marketing money. They could even afford to use Frank Muir in TV ads. All we had was our brand which reeked of authority, reliability and seriousness. The problem was how to broaden the appeal of the brand without besmirching our name or spending money.

We got lucky. A daily word quiz programme called Countdown was being launched (and twenty-five years later it's still going strong) and they had the idea of using live lexicographers as adjudicators. We were invited to supply these boffins and, after negotiations about clothing allowance (lexicographers aren't by and large renowned for dress sense) and attendance fees, we agreed. Oxford dictionaries were promoted every day to a mass audience on TV and the TV company were paying us for the honour. It was (and still is) wonderful branding.

I was reminded of this as I passed Piccadilly Circus on the way to work this morning.

The McDonald's ad in the centre must cost a fortune. This morning it was replaced by the words 'Oxford English Dictionary' and a series of sentences saying why McJobs are really good things. The reason is that the McDonald Corporation has taken offence at the OED definition of 'McJob' - 'an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects'. They are running a petition to have the definition changed and are advertising it on their absolutely main site. Has there ever been a better exposure campaign for Oxford? Whoever decided to include McJob in the dictionary deserves to win the industry branding idea of the year award.

It's party time in the London book world and last night was no exception. Off to the very chic October Gallery for the annual celebration of the existence and future publishing of Gerald Duckworth and Co Ltd, hosted by its owner (also owner of The Overlook Press), Peter Mayer pictured here just after he'd rescued the Duck from the liquidators in 2003.

Since then the company has healed itself and, in spite of market difficulties, is re-established as a home for both general and scholarly authors - still quirky, still small but very definitely alive and kicking.

While Duckworth chugs along perfectly well publishing books traditionally, the debate about the future of the book continues to swirl around the web. Here is yet another (and rather good) discourse on the possible scenarios. Who will be the new publishers? The social networking sites, Amazon, Google...? Or maybe Duckworth or Macmillan will survive by virtue of doing a few things well - spotting an opportunity,finding good authors, encouraging them to write books people want to read (rather than the other sort), editing, packaging, promoting, investing, doing deals for the author and then paying royalties. When someone at my space can do all those things as well as Peter Mayer, then we have something to fear.

Last night I visited the London Library, shamefully for the first time. It is a really beautiful building and the writers I spoke to there all raved about its utility and importance. Here's an old photo of its Art Room.

While the publishing industry is rightly involved in debates about our digital future, the economics of retailing or public library funding, it is easy to forget the importance of aesthetics. I am indebted to Nat Torkington of O'Reilly Radar for this librophiliac link to some of the most beautiful rooms in the world. I cannot think that any other human activity (sports, aviation, theatre, art etc) could have created quite so many wonderful rooms as reading has (although I guess opera houses might come a close second). For purely personal reasons, this is my favourite, the Wren Library of Trinity Cambridge.

But for splendour, how about Melk Abbey Library? And more, so many more.

A few days ago I published some statistics about the proportion of new books sold through independent booksellers in the UK - only 5% of a paperback and 11% of a hardback. Many people have explained these low percentages as being caused by discounted sales through Internet bookshops. I have therefore done some research in Australia where Internet sales represent only 0.4% of the total (compared with 9% for the paperback and 30% for the hardback in my previous example). Even if you allow for people buying from the US or UK Internet sites, the proportion would be very small. These figures reflect sales across hardbacks, paperbacks, fiction and non-fiction (in brackets are my previous numbers, paperback then hardback) - chains 56% (50,50); supermarkets 29% (35,8); Internet 0.4% (9,30); independents 11.5% (5,11); libraries 3% (less than 1 in each case).

I wouldn't claim that these statistics are definitive, hardly anything in publishing is, but they do suggest that picking Internet booksellers as scapegoats for the woes of independent bookselling is ill-founded. It seems that, in the absence of significant Internet bookshops in Australia, customers are buying more books through chain booksellers than in the UK. It's also interesting to note the significantly higher proportion of sales to library suppliers. Perhaps the Australian Government is showing more respect for libraries, books and education than the British bunch. Good on 'em.

Returned from France late yesterday evening to find a note from the police to let me know that someone had smashed the driver's window of my locked and alarmed car, legally parked in a 'safe' street. They didn't steal anything but it'll cost me several hundred pounds to fix assuming no collateral damage (not worth losing a no-claims bonus) and ....grrrrrr.

While in France I was chatting to a nomadic writer. He doesn't own a house and survives by house-sitting for friends around Europe and earning enough from his writing to pay for his car, computer and books. Not a bad life. He was telling me how he has just finished The Discovery of France by Graham Robb and that it was so good he was going to read it again straight away. What an endorsement. There are more extraordinarily glowing reviews from the more traditional reviewing media here.

The book (essentially a social history of France since the beginning) is clearly a work of enormous scholarly importance but it fascinates too. I didn't know about the stilted shepherds (and postmen) of Les Landes. They could move over rough land at 8 mph which is significantly faster than the average speed of traffic in London today. How about the Mayor of London introducing incentives for stilt walking?

And I love these lines he quotes from Madame de Genlis's phrasebook for stagecoach travellers:

"The wheels are on fire… I am suffering greatly. I am going to vomit. Give me the vase".

That's how I felt when I got to see my car last night.

I attended a wonderful wedding at this church on the top of a hill in Southern France yesterday.

The first church was built on this site around 1000 A.D. and it's been adapted, augmented, and fiddled around with ever since. It has, however, always been a church and a very beautiful one too.

The ceremony involved two English friends and the opening hymn was William Blake's Jerusalem.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded there
Among those dark Satanic mills

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my (my) sword sleep in hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land

After the service I asked the Deacon whether he thought that hymn had ever been sung in that church in the past thousand years. The answer was no. I remembered that some German colleagues expresssed ignorance of the hymn at a previous service in England. An American I quizzed told me that she'd never heard it or of it until she came to live in England. Here it is for those who don't know it.

Of course, the hymn IS very English but it is so powerful that I'm surprised it seems not to have crossed national barriers at all. Any explanations? 

And a late addition to this item, the altar of the church in question.

Last night saw the opening game in the Rugby World Cup. I happened to be in Toulouse airport going to a friend's wedding and stopped by the bar with a TV. The silence was golden as it became clear that Argentina were going to beat France. It doesn't mean much in the mathematics of the competition but it certainly makes things interesting. England will probably be next for humiliation.

On the publishing front, the highly successful Macmillan Digital Audio has moved into educational audio with the launch of downloadable Macmillan Readers. This is a series of classic novels with limited vocabulary for learners of English. It will be a fantastic resource for adults as well as students. Try out the samples at least.

In another digital development, an organisation called Live Ink maintains that rearrangement of words can make screen-presented text more readily ingested. I'm not sure, but if you check out this version of Moby Dick they seem to have created an automatic method for turning prose into poetry. I'm sure Melville would have been impressed.

And finally, a plaudit to a competitor. It is fifty years since the launch of Sputnik and New Scientist magazine has produced a wonderful web celebration here if you click on the 'gallery' icon.