Secret Book Business

How did over 5,000 books remain hidden from sight?
In 2003-04, the last period for which the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collected information on the book industry in Australia, the figures showed that 8,602 titles were published in Australia. The ABS numbers came from 244 publishers, purportedly fully representative of Australian publishing, being both big multi-national and small one-person operations.
However, as Andrew Wilkins reported in the September 2008 Australian Bookseller & Publisher, the Australian Books in print database showed that 14,258 titles were published in Australia in 2007. This is 5,656 more books than the ABS numbers – a whopping 65% increase. At first blush, this suggests the Australian publishing industry has had phenomenal success since 2004. Were it only so. When Wilkins linked titles to the 244 publishers used by the ABS, he found these publishers produced 8924 titles in 2007. This represented a reasonable 3.7% increase on their 2003-04 output. Good, but not fantastic.
Where did the other 5,334 titles come from and why haven’t they been counted before? The answer lies in the fact that Wilkins looked at a bibliographic database, one compiled from the list of all books published in Australia in 2007 with an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), rather than rely on the reported output of 244 designated publishers.
All major publishers use ISBNs, as do the vast majority of small and self publishers. In 2007, Wilkins shows that 2782 publishers were responsible for producing just one book. While one book per publisher is an insignificant output, when combined these books represents 19.5% of the total number of books produced in Australia. This is an output up there with the really big publishers. The Top 20 publishers, just 0.1% of all publishers, produced 4512 titles in 2007 – 32% of the total output. What these means is that over 50% of the books published in Australia come from both the 20 largest publishers and the 2782 smallest publishers, with the rest of the titles coming from “medium” publishers (those publishing from 2 to 100 books a year).
Yet, prior to this study, the books produced by he smallest publishers were ignored as part of our publishing output. Their existence wasn’t acknowledged. They were flying “under the radar”, which is the title of a US Book Industry Study Group into this sector. However, no such study has yet been comprehensively carried out in Australia.
How significant a part of the overall sales of books are these “secret” titles? The answer is we don’t know. Many of the books Wilkins identifies may not sell within the traditional bookshop market. Take for example the works of ASA member Philip R. Rush (www.philiprush.com.au). I’ve met Phil in Tasmania and talked to him extensively about his writing and publishing. Phil produces his books and CDs of bush-flavoured poetry himself. He currently has 15 in print and he reprints regularly – in runs that would make many larger publishers salivate! He sells his books and CDs across Australia, using his own card-based customer management system to rustle up order before he first prints, so most of his first print run goes out to his customers straight away – and as a firm sale! He’s developed relationships with the outlets that sell his books over the years. These outlets are rarely traditional bookshops. They are more likely to be Australiana shops, stock and station agents and other retail outlets Phil has identified.
Phil’s poetry has found a wide audience, but it’s one the mainstream market misses. While Phil writes bush poetry, poetry of all descriptions is making quite a mark for itself outside the traditional publishing marketplace. Wilkins’ analysis showed that there were 302 books of poetry published in Australia in 2007. This represented 2% of the total output of titles. However, the ABS numbers, which have been a benchmark for Australian publishing up until now, put the proportion for published poetry at a much lower rate. This is because most poetry is being produced outside the 244 publishers regarded as the backbone of the industry. The print runs may be small and the sales may be slow but poetry is still a going concern for publishers like Five Islands, Puncher & Wattman, Ginninderra, John Leonard Press and other small outfits.
Some of these small publishers (including the ASA) have banded together to assist each other in marketing and distribution. The umbrella group Small Press Underground Networking Community (SPUNC) represents their combined interests. The group may be representative of some of the smallest publishers in Australia, but these publishers are producing books and other media that are on the cutting edge of Australian literary culture. Their work has gone on largely unrecognised by the traditional publishing industry. Yet in creative terms it is an essential part of our cultural development. The SPUNC publishers also include literary journal publishers such as Overland, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and Going Down Swinging as well as publishers focused on young writers such as Wet Ink and Express Media.
All of these activities show that there is a vibrant publishing culture in Australia that has so far remained secret in terms of official analysis. It has escaped the attention of the ABS and the 244 publishers who are commonly regarded as “the trade”. In the USA, the BISG estimated that the value of the “secret book business” there was in the millions of dollars. We can’t come to any similar conclusions about Australia as the data are so sparse, but what is clear is that the areas that are commonly disparaged as valueless by the book trade are in fact both viable and sustainable, albeit marginal in terms of profitability. Not only is publishing flourishing, but short stories are appearing more frequently in book form, 76 collections being published in 2007.
These publications are also finding readers. They may be small in number at present, but they are sufficient to provide impetus for this publishing to continue. SPUNC provided assistance for its Melbourne members (and most of them are at present) to showcase their authors and publications at well-attended fringe events at the Melbourne Writers Festival. These events involved both readings as well as performances of work.
The sessions I attended were exciting, and indicative to me that they were reaching people who were not attending sessions featuring the latest Tuscan summer memoir or wacky American childhood tale. They featured poets and prose writers focused on the local, keen observers of a world they loved and loathed in equal measure, but accepted without hesitation as their own. Laboratory work, sure, and I was reminded of Frankenstein not only by the processes of creation I could see at work but also by the clothes the audiences were wearing.
So how could something this colourful, this enthusiastic, this damn good remain secret? Oops, I’ve let the secret out – Australian literature is alive and kicking all over the place. But there’s a whole heap of it the official radar has missed. It’s happening at small, intimate readings and poetry slams near you, no matter where you are. Catch it before commercial publishing bashes the life out of it. And buy one of the books on sale. Because they won’t be in the bookshops, even though there’s over 5,000 of them.
Copyright © 2008 Australian Society of Authors/Jeremy Fisher. First appeared in Australian Author, December 2008.

Why don’t we care about our literature?

Following is the text of a speech I gave to the South Australian Writers Centre on 27 November, 2008. Many people have asked that I provide a public copy.

Recently the mass media has been full of Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Australia. The spin doctors were working over time. I hope the movie does well. Our film industry needs it to do so.
But one of the unfortunate side-effects of the spin that accompanies the marketing of movies is that there is a perception movies have more significance and public appeal than books. In Australia, this certainly isn’t so. Even if Australia does very well at the box office, the vast number of movies we shall watch are produced in the United States. The box office will total about $1 billion – an awful lot of that will have been spent on spin, on attempts to get you and me into movie theatres or to buy DVDs to watch often very lacklustre films.
In August, figures from Nielsen Bookscan revealed that trade sales for books in Australia were worth $1, 250 million for the previous year. This represented sales of 63 million books, an increase of 7.5 per cent on the previous year.
Nielsen Bookscan data doesn't break out Australian books, but ABS data shows that Australian fiction, non-fiction and children's books (excluding educational titles) had average sales of $438.5 million each year over the period 2000-04. This is a major contribution to the Australian creative industries economy and of course a significant proportion of the sales of books in Australia. It’s also a helluva lot more money than Australian movies made.
Not only that, but five of the top 10 Bookscan bestsellers in the 2007-08 period were Australian. One, 4 Ingredients, sold over 600,000 copies. Another was Underbelly.
Unhappily, only one Australian film, Happy Feet, was in the to 50 films for the same period. So why, I ask, did Baz Luhrmann receive a 40% tax incentive to make Australia while the Australian book industry was rewarded with yet another parallel importation enquiry?
We are being punished for being successful and for standing on our own feet. The funding for Australian literature is pretty paltry. In 2003-05, the Australian Government allocated only $27.6 million to Literature and print media. This included funding for lending rights of around $17 million and amounts offered by the Australia Council. This amount is dwarfed by the enormous sums that flow to major performing arts and opera, arts forms that often fail at a cost recovery basis and offer none of the economic returns that can be seen with literature.
Australian literature is making an enormous contribution to our creative industries economy and this is largely unrecognised. This should not be so.
Let's face the fact that, as a post-colonial country, Australia is still strongly influenced by the central points of English-language culture. From about 1850, those points have been the United Kingdom and the United States.
It is sensible that our schools teach using cultural materials emanating from the United Kingdom and the United States. It is also sensible for them to use cultural materials from Australia's Indigneous cultures as well as the many other cultures from which the children in our schools come. This is all representative of where we have come from and what we are, a bit of a mongrel mix.
However, the most unifying and central themes for educating young Australians come directly from Australian culture, that unholy mess that has evolved here since this timeless land has been named "Australia". Our literature exemplifies and demonstrates those themes best because there is more of it than other forms of narrative. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Australian films and television programs to fill out a curriculum. That's not so for poetry, novels, non-fiction, biography and so on. There's plenty there.
Now let me get a little personal. My book Perfect Timing is about to be published in a Vietnamese translation. It will sell for 20,000 Dong, about A$1.45. I’ll receive 5% of that price on each copy, a princely seven cents, so I’m not about to retire.
But what this makes clear is that books are much cheaper in Vietnam than Australia. I could buy 15 copies of my Vietnamese edition for the price of an average Australian paperback.
So, why is the book cheaper? The paper and print quality will be lower than the Australian edition for one. Another is there’ll be several more thousand copies printed in Vietnam than were ever printed in Australia, but the book will still be a tiny blip in a market of over 80 million readers. And those readers are much poorer than readers in Australia. To them, spending 20,000 Dong on a book is a luxury purchase.
This simply makes it clear that the price of books is relative from one country to another. The return to me from sales in Vietnam will be small financially, but large in the sense that I will have many more readers. I’m assisting with a tiny bit of cultural exchange as well. These are immeasureable benefits with no financial value.
But they’d still be there if I was lucky enough to sell US rights to my book, although the financial implications would be very different. I’d actually make some money – again, not enough to retire on, but enough perhaps for a new computer or new car.
As an author, I can trade my rights in different markets for different reasons. Trading of rights is the commercial basis for life as an author. We can sell Australian publishing rights, rights for translation into Vietnamese or rights to an American edition. This is intrinsic to our continued livelihood. Quite a few authors have different publishers in different markets. Australia, in line with most major book markets in the world, including the United States and United Kingdom, is currently a “closed “ market. Books can only be published here by the entity who holds the rights to the Australian territory. These rights are saleable parts of the bundle of rights that make up an author’s copyright. For example, popular author Jodi Picoult is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia, but by Hachette in the UK and Atria in the USA.
However, there are moves afoot to take some of these rights away from us. The moves are being led by booksellers, particularly Dymocks
Dymocks wants an open market. They wants to take away the right of Australian authors to transact their rights in different markets. Their argument is driven by the profit motive of course. Dymocks claims the wholesale price of books is cheaper in the United States through competition. And there is undoubtedly more competition in the US in the book industry than there is in Australia. The US book market is more than 10 times the size of Australia. Dymocks also claims books are expensive in Australia because the Australian publishing industry is artificially protected from competition.
But the US is by no means an open market. Nor should it be. Both the United States and Australia are separate copyright territories, and books are licensed into each territory by their rightsholders. Few Australian books receive much attention in the US. The Australian market is far more competitive than the US market because Australian books have to compete with those from the US and the UK. Under our law as it currently stands, all books published outside Australia must be made available in Australia within 30 days of their publication, or the rightsholder loses their exclusive licence to publish the book in Australia.
Dymocks is pushing hard to destroy Australia as a distinct publishing territory. In their argument, they ignore the fact that the US and UK are closed markets. They also ignore the fact that book prices in open market territories such as New Zealand and Singapore are equal to or greater than those in so-called closed markets.
Their fallacious argument is designed merely to increase Dymock’s profit margins, not to make books cheaper. Dymocks could make book prices cheaper in their stores overnight, if that was their real interest. How? Dymocks receives a minimum 40% discount on the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) on books it buys from publishers so they have nearly half the price of the book to play with in -- and often more when they negotiate bigger discounts. We don’t know how much of the 40% of the price of a book is Dymocks profit And it’s not as if bookselling is a risky business. Their purchases from publishers are on a sale or return basis. What they haven’t moved off the floor after six weeks gets sent back to the publisher for credit.
In contrast, life is bit tougher for the publisher, and much more so for the poor author. When a book is sold by Dymocks, the publisher gets about 12% (at least ABS statistics from 2004, the most recently available, show that) and the author generally receives 10%.
What’s clear is as authors we need to stand up and be counted – counted as a successful industry, counted for what we add to our culture and counted as opposing any changes to our current system. I urge you all to make your voices heard to the Productivity Commission. Detail are on the ASA website – www.asauthors.org

A pencil needs no electricity

In the June issue of Australian Bookseller & Publisher, retiring Wiley MD Peter Donoughue wrote a swansong article claiming the ASA knew next to nothing about educational publishing and rubbishing our research in the area. Donoughue was so pleased with his opus he rushed up to me at the Australian Industry Book Awards to ask if I had read it. I have now, and I can only say it’s fortunate Peter is retiring. Another educational publisher, Peter Debus, offers a more balanced view of educational publishing in the August 2008 issue of the Author. Debus accepts that the ASA is right in its assessment that the educational publishing sector is in its death throes. He doesn’t maintain Donoughue’s “head in the sand” position.
Yet the ASA, Debus and Donoughue are all describing the same elephant. How can we diverge so much in our descriptions?
The answer lies in judicious use of the facts. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 25 July that federal public servants were involved in a systematic revision of Wikipedia entries about federal politicians. The parliamentary librarian was reported to have emailed instructions on how to alter Wikipedia entries to ensure the entries displayed only favourable information.
We can be sure that the practice is not unique to Canberra. It goes on all over the world. Why? Because it can. Wikipedia is open to all. It claims that this is its great strength. It says it can collect a massive amount of facts. And it does. You can read biographies of porn stars alongside entries about Australian politicians as well as overlong essays on arcane musicians and brief entries on Australian poets.
I even rate a mention. And that’s just a few of the reasons why Wikipedia’s authority should never be trusted.
The trouble with a freely available and editable source of information like Wikipedia, or the entire internet, is that it is so easily manipulable. And believable. That’s why politicians in the UK, US and Australia increasingly use YouTube and internet communications in elections. And it’s also why governments in China, Vietnam and Burma attempt to restrict access to the internet, or at least try to control content. Even a lovefest like the Olympics was not enough for Chinese authorities to release their grip on internet communications. And maybe we have to ask if they are right when our own politicians use the internet for their own nefarious propaganda purposes.
Wikipedia makes some claims to informational authority. Because of this, or perhaps because journalists like anyone else prefer the easy option, Wikipedia seems to have replaced a number of journalistic research skills. Students also relay on its immediacy and convenience. I’m not averse to it myself. I will often check for information there. However, and I am thankful for my editorial training for this, I don’t take Wikipedia information as the ultimate authority. Goodness, I’ll even consult some fossil reference source such as a book.
I admit I may be too much of a cynic, but these days I don’t trust any source of information unless I can verify the information there with at least two independent sources. Such rules used to be de rigeur for editors and journalists, although there were some sources we accepted.
In times past I would have trusted the Australian Encyclopaedia, for whose fourth edition I created the index, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Both of these publications had in place sound editorial polices and practices that ensured any errors were kept to a bare minimum. Were they error-free? No, but they had the gravitas of both peer review and editorial rigour.
What do I mean by editorial rigour? This is best answered with an example. As the literary heir of our Founding President Dal Stivens, recently the ASA received a number of his files and manuscripts. Included in these is the original copy-edited manuscript of Dal’s children’s book The Bushranger (Collins, 1978), the corrected galley-proofs and a letter from Miss Margaret R. Jones, the copy-editor. Among other queries, all guided by the purpose of making the book as accurate as possible for young readers, Miss Jones asks Dal to check his references to “pines”. She notes that Pinus radiata was not introduced into Victoria until 1857, leading her to question his usage since the book is set at an earlier time. Miss Jones was relying only on print sources, but I wonder whether anyone would even think to query such a point today.
I understand that the creators and editors of Wikipedia claim their data has a level of accuracy similar to the old print encyclopaedias, but the only research I have been able to uncover to validate those claims considers scientific articles. Wikipedia articles, contributed by over 13,000 volunteers, vary in quality, style and accuracy. They haven’t been subjected to a rigorous editorial audit.
Still, that doesn’t alter the fact that printed encyclopaedias have passed on, victims of the instant “authority” of the internet and Wikipedia. The skills involved in their production are being forgotten in the rush to accept instant information. But is that information any use? It is not the amount of information we can access that is fundamentally important, but what we do with it, which is why the governments of China, Vietnam and Burma have a much better understanding of the power of knowledge than do the politicians of the UK, US and Australia.
Knowledge is power.
I could lament the good old days. But again why? What was good about a reference book so heavy that it could cause a hernia? Or door-to-door salesmen hustling working class families into over-priced payment schemes for a rapidly aging set of books?
Even when I was doing my bit for the sum of knowledge about Australia in 1983, we were aware the encyclopaedia had a limited life. We had no idea of the internet, though. At that time, the IT specialists advised us that printed information would all flow onto CD-ROMs and these would be what people would use to access reference works. Hence part of my indexing brief was to ensure my index comprised logical indicators for both print and electronic formats.
But as we know the CD-ROM revolution never happened. And now we have the internet and DVDs to play with. So much so that many children these days gain almost all their information over the web, using a computer keyboard and mouse. On 28 July 2008 the Herald reported that some students preparing for the NSW Higher School Certificate needed to learn handwriting to be able to sit the written exams, which restrict typing to disabled students.
It shocks me that students could reach adulthood and lack the ability to write words. I imagine there will be some who would argue that this is just the way of the world, another sign of “progress”, another change to the way we live life.
These people would argue that life changes because technology changes. And I agree that the wheel was only invented because it made life easier than dragging things along the ground. But I worry that our current dependence on technology puts us a precarious position because the technology we rely on is dependent upon the provision of energy, particularly electrical energy, and in creating that energy we threaten our very existence.
We need to keep some skills that do not require any more energy than picking up a pencil. We need to be able to check our facts and, a very old skill, sort the wheat from the chaff, even in our assessment of the state of educational publishing. Otherwise we trust only new technology, turn to our plasma screens and burn down the future.
But what’s the point in going faster if we are merely going to crash into a brick wall sooner?

Copyright © 2008 Australian Society of Authors and Jeremy Fisher

ELR funding confirmed

The Minister for the Arts, Senator George Brandis SC, confirmed that funding for Educational Lending Rights (ELR) had been confirmed past 2008 on 8 August 2007 (see his press release here).

The Australian Society of Authors was instrumental in establishing ELR. The ELR program provides payments to eligible Australian creators and publishers on the basis that they are missing out on potential royalty payments when their books are borrowed from educational libraries rather than purchased. The Public Lending Right program (PLR) provides the same support for works held in public libraries.

ELR was established in 2000–01 as an element of the Book Industry Assistance Plan, offering compensation for the imposition of the goods and services tax (GST). It received funding of $35 million for the period 2000–01 to 2003–04. Following a review of the programme in 2003, $44 million was provided in the 2004–05 Budget to continue the scheme for the next four years. Further funding has now been confirmed. The Australian Labor Party has also made a commitment to further funding for ELR in its Arts statement.

The ASA calls for the capital pool for ELR to be increased to at least $16 million to allow for increases in the number of books to which it applies as well as to compensate for the static level of funding for the previous four years. The ELR pool should also be subject to the same indexation applying to the PLR pool (the ASA also calls for an increase of the PLR pool to $10 million).

Macquarie University Graduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing

I will be presenting a seminar to students in the Macquarie University Diploma of Editing and Publishing course on October 4. The seminar will cover issues relevant to authors and professional issues related to authorship.

The Australian Book Market: A brief economic outline

What research there is on the Australian book industry has been conducted comparatively recently. From 2000-2004, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) assessed the industry as part of the Book Industry Assistance Package given by the current Federal Government as compensation for the imposition of the GST on books. Data in this blog entry comes from the ABS.

The net sales value of the book market in Australia was $1,560.6 million in 2003-04, a slight decline from $1,578.6 million in 2002-03. In 2003-04, there were 234 businesses identified as book publishers and a further 10 identified as major contributors. In 2002-03, the overall operating profit (income, less expenses of $1,487.7 million and a reduction in inventories of $2.5 million) for the industry was $88.4 million (5.6%), but, even with a decrease in net sales value, 2003-04 proved a better year than the previous one with the overall operating profit rising to $152.1 million (9.7%) as expenses were lower at $1,404.4 million and reduction in inventories was $4.2 million. In 2003-04, 133 of 244 publishers were involved mainly in publishing books of general content while 111 were involved mainly with publishing educational books (including professional and reference books).

Just on 60% of the books sold in Australia originate in Australia accounting for sales in 2003-04 of $811.9 million. This is a vast change from 1960, when 75% of the books sold in Australia were imported, and 1980, when 63% of the books sold in Australia were imported.

However, the change in ownership of publishers has been insidiously the other way. Very few Australian companies feature on the list of the Top 20 publishers. However, it is interesting to note that the structure of the industry hasn’t changed much in over 20 years. In 1982, there were 200 active publishers in Australia, compared with 234 in 2003-04. In 1982, no publishers had a turnover of more than $40 million, and only 20% had a turnover of more than $2 million. The majority had a turnover of less than $1 million. This pattern was pretty much unaltered in 2003-04. While there are no publicly available figures on the turnover of most Australian publishing companies because they don't have to report to Australian authorities or are privately owned, it is possible to gauge their size through their reported activities and the annual reports of their overseas owners. As well the ABS has reported (the only year it has done so) that in 2000-01, the 20 largest book publishers in terms of income earned an average of $52 million each, while the remaining book publishers earned an average of $2 million. Overall the 228 businesses involved in book publishing in that year earned an average of $6 million each.

These facts need to be placed in a global context. For example, the international operations of Harcourt Education (purchased by Pearson in 2007), which include Australia, had an operating profit of A$69.6 million for the six months ended June 2004, the 2004 world-wide revenue for McGraw-Hill in 2004 was A$3,050 million with an operating profit of A$432 million, and the 2003 world-wide revenue for Random House (part of privately owned, German Bertelsmann) was A$2,940 million. In other words, the Australian market is a very small part of global publishing, and the global activities of some of the larger publishers operating in Australia are larger than the entire Australian market.

Closer examination of the Australian market reveals that 77% ($1,198.3 million) of the 2003-04 total income for publishers and other major contributors was generated by the 20 largest (in terms of income) book publishers. These 20 publishers were equally as significant in sales, selling 78% ($1,057.8 million) of the value of total book sales and 76% (97.7 million) of all books sold, but their profit margin was lower than that for the overall industry at 9.5% in 2003-04 while it was 12.7% for the other publishers. Mind you, that's not a bad return!

Educational Publishing in Australia: what's it worth?

There is no comprehensive analysis of sales in the educational market. Statistics have not been collected since 2004 as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) no longer received funding to do so.

Currently, the education sector represents the largest publishing segment. It was worth $547.8 million in 2002-03, with $342.5 million of that resulting from Australian published material, but had dropped to $526.1 million in 2003-04. Of the 2003-04 sales, books produced in Australia were worth $343.4 million or 65% of educational sales. Most of these were for school use, the largest proportion of imported titles being used in tertiary education, though the number of imported titles being used in schools is growing and is a worrying trend for both culture and income for educational writers.

The decline in sales of educational books reflects international patterns and perhaps the influence of internet in education. Copyright Agency Ltd (CAL) is reporting a greater rate of copying of material available on the internet. Its market size had increased year by year since 2000 but plummeted to $498.8 million in 2003-04 (Table). There were 4615 new Australian educational titles published in 2002-03 and 4610 in 2003-04.

Table: Income from sales in the educational publishing market in Australia 2000-2004
Period Australian Education (m) Imported Education (m) Total (m)
2000-01 $295.9 $178.4 $474.3
2001-02 $310.2 $209 $519.2
2002-03 $328.4 $205.3 $533.7
2003-04 $313.2 $185.6 $498.8

Source: ABS

Publishing: Is it dying?

The Literature Board of the Australia Council and Copyright Agency ran a seminar on the digital future of publishing in Sydney on 17 July. It was a very good, well-attended seminar, much more useful and relevant than similar ones I have attended over the past 10 or 15 years and perhaps that is because something is finally begin to take shape that we can actually term "digital publishing". But in many respects the views expressed at the seminar continued to repeat the mantra that if we (writers and publishers) do not leap into the digital future we are doomed.

The assumption here is that the future of publishing must be digital and I am not sure that that is true. There are plenty of opportunities to explore in the digital world but I am not yet writing off books and print publications. First we need to ensure we know what the digital world has to offer us. After all it has changed our lives in so many ways already. The fact that I can write this blog is indicative of that.

But I am not earning income from this type of writing (yet). Writers who spend considerable amounts of their time online writing blogs like this are taking time away from writing works that have more potential to give them income. I have two book reviews I need to complete, for example.

The argument put up by the digital evangelists is that a blog like this will give me a presence in the digital world and expand my profile so that I will have more opportunities to earn income from other writing sources. Having a blog like this is said to be part of creating the author as brand name.

I don't know. It is certainly easy enough to start a blog and add links to my writing available on the web. And I think it is as certain that publishing models have changed and will continue to change. Nobody these days is investing in printed encyclopaedias. Journals are more and more likely to be published online. There are advantages to both writers and readers in this. The material can be more immediate and corrections and commentary can be added to the original digital publication.

Educational publishing in general is suffering in the traditional model of print-based text because the consumers -- teachers and students -- can find better resources online or in other places. Already we have seen Thomson Corporation and Reed Elsevier depart textbook publishing, although both companie retain their lucrative online professional publishing operations. They have built themselves profitable online niches.

Pearson has opted to acquire more, as shown by its recent acquistion of the international Harcourt operations. Is Pearson able to re-engineer itself from a traditional publisher to a supplier of digital material in time to beat the critical nexus when print=based income will decline and digital income will not yet be sufficient to replace it? We shall see. It is interesting that Houghton Mifflin-Riverdeep have purchased Harcourt in the USA. Riverdeep is fundamentally a supplier of digital content. It does not ned to re-engineer itself. I'll be interested to see how each of these companies is performing in three years time.