One of the most innovative publishers in the world is the computer book publisher O'Reilly. They have been at the cutting edge of collaborations with Google and Amazon, with copyright-lite experimentation etc. It is therefore with great delight that I spotted this paragraph from O'Reilly Radar about the sales of computer books:

If you wonder whether it matters to publishers whether books appear in stores given that they can be ordered online, try breathing through a straw. You can get all the air you want if you lie low, but you'd better not try any strenuous activity. Retail distribution is like the alveoli in our lungs -- it increases the surface area for respiration, except in this case, rather than oxygen binding to hemoglobin, it's customers binding to possible products to purchase. People go to Amazon and other online retailers with specific purchases in mind. Despite all Amazon's brilliant work on collaborative filtering and recommendations, a computer screen just doesn't match up to a physical bookstore when it comes to browsing and the chance discoveries that spark an unplanned purchase.

What more can I say? I think the Booksellers Association should invite Tim O'Reilly to give the keynote address at their next conference.

In the staff canteen in our Kings Cross offices yesterday I got into a conversation about the death of the musical. I argued, for no particular reason, that a more obvious case was the dearth of listenable operas since Puccini packed it in. I was, of course, reprimanded and corrected by my younger and betters and thoroughly shamed by the fact that we have just published a book as a result of a contemporary opera.

David Frost's brilliant book about his confrontation with Richard Nixon follows the extraordinarily successful opera Nixon in China and the play Frost/Nixon. So drama and opera (and I'd argue musicals too) still flourish.

The game I started last Friday to guess the order by sales value of ten of Pan Macmillan's Autumn best sellers has generated a few entries and so I'd better clarify the 'rules'. The winner/s will have listed the correct order by invoiced sales value up to 31 December 2007 of these ten books. More information on each is available through the highlighted links. It would be helpful if entries could be made as 'comments' on the original posting. No more entries after the end of September so that I can then post progress on the 'runners' as the Autumn season develops. If we get too many winners I'll introduce some sort of tie-breaking competition.

Chameleon's Shadow by Minette Walters (pub September 20th)

World Without End by Ken Follett (pub date October 4th)

Trevor Glover died last week. He worked for Penguin in Australia and the UK, he was President of the Publishers Association and then became Managing Director of the eminent music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. There will be formal obituaries in the trade press next week.

I got to know him best during the 'reversion wars of the early nineties when he had returned from Australia to run the London office of Penguin and was having to live with the Rushdie fatwa affair. I was responsible for building a paperback list to support the trade hardback houses then owned by Reed International, William Heinemann, Secker and Warburg and Methuen. One way to improve the list was to publish authors whose books had previously been licensed to third-party paperback publishers, frequently Penguin. (This is a normal part of life today but at the time was considered in some way evil, or at least underhand.) The licence on a very important, albeit not huge selling, author (whose identity you'll have to guess) came up for renewal and we told Penguin that we would revert unless they coughed up a very very large advance for an extension of the licence. Trevor called to ask if our absurd request was for real which it was. He quite rightly refused to pay the advance and we prepared to publish the books ourselves. A few weeks later he called again. He'd been thinking about what it would be like to be the head of Penguin responsible for losing this particular author. He realised that Penguin without that writer on its list just wouldn't be the same and he agreed to the ridiculous refresher advance. The book trade and the world without Trevor just won't be the same either.

Peter James, whose latest hardback Looking Good Dead is his best ever, sportingly contributed to my best seller competition of last Friday even though he doesn't have a book in the list (the latest one was too early, the next one too late to be included). However, he has sent me this picture which illustrates how well Russian publishers treat visiting British authors. Tasteful or what?

Incidentally, there is no charge for entering the competition. The prize has yet to be decided but it will, I'm certain, be worth winning. Nobody is excluded, so please go to here and enter your list as a comment, not forgetting to enter the anti-spam code underneath the comment box.

Because it's Sunday I think I'm allowed a 'use of English' moan. I received this from the Chelsea Arts Club:

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.