A treasure trove of information

We have just had a holiday weekend in Glasgow and we spent it near Dunbar on the other side of Edinburgh. There happened to be a bookstall in Dunbar high street where I came across a chubby fat tome called The Modern Encyclopaedia for Children - A companion to school work and out-of-school interests for all young people who wish to know more. It was published by Odhams Books Ltd in 1966.

The How to Use page begins with this fine sentence: 'An encyclopaedia is like a well-filled cupboard. Every page is a shelf stocked with information arranged for your convenience'. With all its advantages, you can't say that about the internet. I have been flicking through the encyclopaedia and it is packed full of great stuff: from embroidery stitches to biographies of famous people. It also has illustrations to add to its well-stocked facts. Just look at the opening page for E with an illustration of an ear.

This is just the sort of book any grandparent worth their salt would buy for their grandchildren. But publishers don't think there is a market for this kind of book. I bet packaged up like Dangerous Book for Boys and all that nostalgia genre like i before e (except after c): Old School Ways to Remember Stuff and it would be a hit.

Let's bear in mind how much skill it takes to condense a subject into such short pithy entries. This is the kind of stuff dictionary and reference folk can do. But as they are going the way of coopers and blacksmiths, we must just mourn their passing. The trouble with the internet is that it is infinite. You end up overwhelmed with too much information, whereas flicking through an encyclopaedia takes you on a journey of discovery.

Printed dictionaries - publishing dinosaurs or endangered species?

Harry Campbell, our guest blogger looks at the turmoil being felt in the dictionary world.

It’s been a funny week in dictionaries. The 300th anniversary of the birth of Dr Samuel Johnson has been celebrated with endless radio programmes and snippets of his definitions. Johnson was an extraordinary man who could almost be said to have invented the English dictionary as we know it. His supposed dislike of all things Scottish is often mentioned, but of course one of his best friends, his first biographer, was a Scot.

Dictionaries are one of those areas where Scotland has really made its mark. Perhaps the most famous Scottish lexicographer was James Murray, the foremost editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. A self-educated polymath from a poor home, he combined the relentless, uncompromising rigour necessary to produce a first-class text with the resilience to see the thing though to publication, no mean task for anyone, let alone a tailor’s son from a small town in the Borders struggling for acceptance in the stiff, snobbish world of Victorian Oxford.

But the OED, currently running to twenty volumes, was never meant to be a mass-market item. The dictionary on the writer’s desk or the crossword enthusiast’s coffee-table was and is very likely to come from Chambers of Edinburgh, whose founders were also sons of the Borders. Like Murray, William and Robert Chambers were poor and largely self-taught, their father’s textile business having been ruined in the Napoleonic wars. Starting out as booksellers and moving into publishing, they specialised in educational works, notably an encyclopedia which appeared in no fewer than 520 parts between 1859 and 1868. The famous Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary first appeared in 1901, and a century later sailed boldly on into the new millennium as Chambers 21st Century Dictionary. Despite their abruptly curtailed educations (and, apparently, the congenital deformity of six fingers and six toes on each hand and foot), they did pretty well for themselves. The elder brother, William Chambers of Glenormiston, almost like some fairy-tale hero, ended up as Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and is commemorated by an enormous statue in a street named after him.

But all this worthy self-improvement need not preclude a sense of fun. The Chambers Dictionary is very much a word-lover’s companion, the traditional choice of the Scrabble player and crossword enthusiast, delighting in weird and wonderful vocabulary. It’s also known, rather like Johnson’s dictionary before it, for its occasionally jocular or satirical definitions, such as the one at éclair, which famously begins “a cake, long in shape but short in duration...”. The Chambers website has a blog rejoicing in the name of Clishmaclaver, a couthy Scottish colloquialism meaning casual chat or gossip. The whole outfit manages to convey an exuberant love of words. Basically, they have style as well as authority.

Like its Glasgow rival, Collins, which started out at much the same time and is now part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, Chambers was a family firm until quite recently: Antony Chambers, whose great-great-grandfather Robert founded the company, died in 2007. These firms chugged along happily enough for generation after generation, producing honest-to-goodness items like dictionaries and encyclopaedias, diaries and bibles, before finally being gobbled up by the media empires that now run everything, with their short-term attitudes and their lust for quick returns. And as you know already if you read Caroline’s blog, Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh is now facing closure, taking with it not only 27 jobs but a huge chunk of publishing history.

I don’t think it’s excessive to describe this as a tragedy. It’s the end of an era, a sign of the times, a loss not just to Scotland or Britain but to the English-speaking world. Who can say where the printed book will be in ten or twenty years? Already people are predicting the death of the newspaper; dictionaries, which are so much more convenient and powerful in electronic form than as expensive slabs of dead tree, are surely in much greater danger. The staff at Chambers are hoping a rabbit can be pulled out the hat to save the day, but the two big beasts of the Scottish press, the Scotsman in Edinburgh and the Herald in Glasgow, have said their affectionate farewells.

A week after the closure was announced, the English press, as far as I can see, has yet to find a single column inch to devote to the news.

Harry Campbell is a lexicographer and author of the highly entertaining Whatever happened to Tanganyika?

Am I bovvered?

Probably the answer is 'yes'. Last week (on the 16th of September to be precise) I was 50. It was not a milestone I was pleased to stagger by. Nor was it helped by two low star reviews for Nod off in Portuguese and Nod off in Spanish both by a certain S Saunders. Just saying the name brings out a very suspicious snaky sort of sound.

What is even more annoying is that I suspect that the reviewer had just skimmed through the first 20 pages or so of the booklet that you can read on the website and based his review on this (I don't think he's even bought the packs and bothered to listen to the CDs) .


Just let me say that we are not out to rip anyone off. The Nod off title is rather tongue in teach (I mean cheek). The subject we are covering is essentially grammar and most people would probably prefer to nod off. As for accents, they are the bain of many language learners. Presenting them visually on 'Accent Man' is a way of making them easier to remember. Do forgive us for letting a cedilla masquerade as an accent rather than a mark under a consonant - we shall have to create Accent Man's twin brother Mark Man for future editions. Accent Man is fun, so sucks to you, S Saunders.

As for the snide insinuation about the reliability of the information in the Spanish Nod Off, I reckon that is completely out of order and I need to get back to Amazon on that.

Dear learners, for £8.99 (£10.99 for the Portuguese) not only do you get a beautifully produced CD, you get a 48-page equally well presented booklet. You won't find that in Earworms, Michel Thomas or a One-Day course. The information covered is meant to promote a much clearer understanding of how a language works and is done with as light a touch as possible.

Hurt, moi, well the answer has to be 'yes'. It also hurts The Publishing Cupboard and the authors who compile the Nod offs.

A sad day for Scottish and reference publishing

Today it was announced that Chambers Harrap is to close in Edinburgh with the loss of up to 27 jobs. This is sad news indeed and comes exactly a year after the Lehmans Bank collapse. Not that the two are directly linked, but the bank's collapse set up a chain of events which we see filtering down to middle Britain. It also happens on the day that the new Dan Brown novel is published to some indecent discounting from Asda, The Book Depository and Amazon. At the last check it was down to £4.99.

Discounting has done untold damage to dictionaries where you regularly see 75% off the published price and there hasn't been enough thought about how to make them more desirable than a quick click on the PC. But I think the loss of talent that go into creating dictionaries will be enomous. Working on a dictionary is largely a labour of love and one that is carried out with as much thouroughness as possible. The reputations of both publisher and editor are at stake.

The internet is faceless. More importantly there is no one to write to when one spots an error or has discovered a new word. When you click at your screen, nobody is there to advise you with the random translation you have found. The other day I was looking at some Apps (don't ask, go to the Apple Store). One was a translation App. It did quite a good job at translating, but didn't show that there was a feminine ending to be used if you were a female. Nor did it distinguish between singular and plural verbs. Will anyone care?

A sad, sad day. And one that diminishes the knowledge base that we have.

The Post Office Guru

I have a very nice post office. Not only does it provide me with postage stamps, I was also taught kapalabhati by the post mistress's husband. For those who are not yoga mad like me, kapalabhati is a breathing exercise where you force air out though the nose by pulling your tummy in very sharply. Air is then automatically drawn back in through the nose. It is a strong movement and you must build up a rythm like a steam train. As with all breathing exercises, it's best learnt from a teacher. Also called front brain cleanser, kapalabhati has the power to lower blood pressure. And if you use enough force, it should shift some fat from around the abdomen.

But I digress from the main question of this blog which is how much does debt intefere with life. I understand that students starting university this year can expect to leave owing £23K. To me, this is a staggering amount to have hanging on your head as you start out in life. This is before even stepping onto the property ladder. Surely, it must have a detrimental effect on young people's minds and their whole outlook on life.

Which brings me back to the post office. This week's Saturday Guardian was full of interesting articles. And before I even opened it, I bought my copy from the post mistress's daughter whom I know had been working in Ruanda as an economist and was now studying for a PhD at Glasgow University. When I asked her what she was resarching, it turned out to be economic anthropology. Admittedly, I never knew economic anthropology existed, but I was interested to know if she thought that poverty leads to creativity in building wealth. I was thinking of Italian immigrants who left the grinding poverty of Italy to build a better life in the States early in the last century.

Her reply was most interesting, in that it depended on the culture around the poor person. Perhaps in some (Italians) it leads to a gritty determination, but in other cultures such as Africa it wouldn't be the case.

I wonder how creativity (indeed life) is affected by debt in affluent countries. Particularly in young folk such as university students who are no longer studying to better their minds and have a good time (which I confess was my aim in the late 70s and early 80s, supported by the grant system). I may have graduated straight into the 'Labour isn't working' recession of the late 70s, but at least I didn't have a chainball of debt to keep me company. The post mistress's daughter pointed out that students were now consumers of education and as consumers now had to make sure that they were getting their money's worth.

It turns out that Margaret Atwood has written a book on the subject. There was a piece in Saturday's Guardian about the crash and books on the subject (scroll down to see the bit by Margaret Atwood).

I think it is time some research was done on debt and its effects on modern life. Rationing after the war had a positive side effect in that people had never eaten so healthily. I fear that debt might have completely the opposite effect both mentally and physically.

Back to the e-book

There was a very good letter in the Guardian magazine this Saturday and probably is an accurate reflection of my feelings about e-books.

Another thing to take into account is one e-book or two (or three or four?). They are ok if you live on your own, but what if another member of your household wants to e-read? This involves having more than one e-reader knocking about. And how many folk can afford that (at the current price). The price of the e-reader really does have to come down, down, down.

I can't say it doesn't hurt

Poor old Nod off in French seems to have attracted another one star review. I always feel slightly gutted. This new reviewer thought she was going to wake up knowing French after the first listening and dismissed it straightaway.

Dear learners, I am afraid that you won't wake up instantly knowing French. It does require relistening to the next day to embed information. And flicking through the rather superior booklet also reinforces the learning process.

And surely, reviewing Mother, if you have bilingual children, aren't you pretty much fluent yourself? Or how do you communicate with your other moitie (there should be an acute acccent on that last e)?

And the other one starrer reviewer from Ireland thought they were listening to a phrase book. They must have been dreaming.

Have you noticed how I am into screen shots?

No longer an e-virgin

Having spouted on as though an expert on e-books, I realised that there seem to be two types available: one which is just a pdf essentially and the other is a more malleable pdf, in that it can transform itself to fit into various screens and is known as an ePub book. This is the one you need if you plan to put it on your mobile and is the industry standard.

Anyway, I decided to buy a cheap ebook and got this gem from the Mills & Boon site.


The site was very user friendly and displayed on the pink band that both paperback and e-book were available. Both priced at a very reasonable £1.49 (that is including the required VAT for ebooks). Mind you there are only 82 pages. They also showed me how to download my free ebook reader from Adobe which I duly did. This I think is just a pdf and not epub so you can only read it on your computer screen or an ereader.


It is really a screen of text that you scroll down with chapter breaks. You can make the text quite big and quite small. All in all I felt Mills & Boon were very helpful and consumer focussed.

When I went to Random House site called rBooks , I am not sure that I found it quite so helpful. I wonder whether their website is directed at people who are more publishing savvy rather than general public.


You see the paperback for a Random House novel. They call it trade paperback, which just means paperback to you and me. It is priced £11.69. There is a section at the bottom which says other editions where you see 'hardback, cd and e-book' and you have to click to the one you want.

When you click e-book, you find it priced at £19.64 (10% less than the hardback which is currently published - I should have mentioned that the paperback isn't due out until November).

Seems a bit bonkers to me. What I really wanted to illustrate was the not so user-friendliness of the site. It is assuming that the general public know things about the booktrade such as hardbacks coming out before paperbacks. That a different format is called an edition and so on.

Anyway, I have displaced enough time already. I am off to read my Sicilian Wedding.

The only good thing to come out of this blog is that I have learned how to save screenshots. If you t00 want to know, watch this. What it didn't tell me was that I had to use the printscreen button on my actual laptop rather than the separate keyboard I normally use.

Odds and sods

Ach well, they did not bad, but as Chick Young (football pundit) kept repeating 'Another glorious defeat' .

Yesterday I read an article painting a realistic picture of what being a full-time writer entails. It is equally relevant for publishers trying to get books out into the market. And it was confirmed later in the day with the news that for the first time in two years HarperCollins had the number one bestseller spot:

HarperCollins has secured its first overall number one for almost two years, with Irish writer Cathy Kelly's Once in a Lifetime hitting the top spot this week after the publisher promised its biggest ever marketing campaign for the author it regards as the heir to Maeve Binchy. It ends a lengthy dry spell for the publisher which had not had a Top 50 number one since Josephine Cox’s Journey’s End in October 2006 (Bookseller).

Note those words biggest ever marketing campaign for the author. Sad to say but this is how you get books into bookshops and then into customers' hands. Publicity is great, author tours are great but they are never going to be as effective as a well-funded marketing campaign.

As long as we all understand that, we won't end up disappointed. But read Robert Weinberg's article, it is spot on.

Forza Scozia

I am sitting in The Cupboard and Scotland are playing their decisive World Cup game against The Netherlands. Glasgow city centre was awash with orange wigs (and they were just the Scots). I can hear the match on BBC Radio Scotland. They are acquitting themselves very well and I hope they win. They may not have the sprezzatura of the Italians, but they are feisty.

Could I have found my market?

'There are four classes in Britain - the upper class, the middle class, the lower class and the evening class.'

I cannot take credit for such a wonderful quote. I think I read it in the Guardian many years ago. However, it sums up my market exactly. Life long learners. That tenacious band of students who are determined to learn something even though they may not have been very good at it at school. Like dieters, they are always in search of a new way of learning. Happily, they are an open-minded bunch of people who are prepared to try different approaches.

But how to get to them? Bookshops are the obvious way, but as most small publishers know getting a title into a bookshop is no mean feat these days. But how refreshing to find that the managers of John Smith Univeristy bookshops do their own buying. Because each university is unique with its own special blend of courses, they get to choose what is right for their shop. And most unis run evening classes. So many thanks to John Smith at Strathclyde who are taking the Nod offs. Proof, of course, is in the buying. But with covers like ours and a price that prompts a pront purchase, we have no worries on that score.

Bullish or what!

Why can't the big publishers get their act together?

Once again the e-book debate dominates the Bookseller front page. A surevey has been carried out and it must be no suprise to anyone that:

'Of those who already have an e-reader, the range and quality of books available to download was rated the least satisfying aspect of owning a device.'

As far as I can work out, the internet is a hungry beast. It wants content, content and more content. To make sure that people will pay for content, it needs to be delivered in a uniform format that works on multiple platforms (e-reader, iPod, mobile, perhaps even a big screen for those with sight problems).

The big publishers should get someone well-respected in the trade, perhaps Graham Bell from HarperCollins, and get him to come up with a solution for all publishers.

They should then set up their own e-shop and sell, sell, sell at a price that the customer is willing to pay. Unless they do something soon, the market will be lost to the likes of Amazon. If Audible (now owned by Amazon) only pay 15% of the price of an audiobook to publishers, what hope is there with e-books. And audiobooks are much more expensive to produce (paying the adaptation, paying the voices, paying the production). An e-book won't involve all these costs.

Dragons' Den revisited

Yesterday I found myself watching Dragons' Den: on tour. Regular readers may remember that I featured last year in series 6 and whilst being in front of the Dragony Five was the least enjoyable bit, I spent a whole day in the Green Room meeting the other nervous entrepreneurs.

So yesterday's show meant I found out what happened to a few of them. It also proved that the road to a successful business is hard. The Shoes Galore lady was great fun and has obviously taken the pragmatic approach. She sold the franchise and is now selling off her colourful stock.

The olive oil man was living a fantasy dream and perhaps not business-oriented enough to make it work. His view that the supermarket buyers were rather rude because some hadn't even returned his call or email means he is probably doomed to failure (unless he gets a business partner as Deborah advised).

The 'trunkie' man seemed great. What a brilliant idea. He just needs to design a Ryan. A similar case for travelling with only handbaggage on Ryanair. The idea of it doubling up as a seat makes it very attractive - particularly in airports like Bergamo Orio al Serio which is more of a cattleshed than departure lounge. I don't know why the Dragons let it slip through their claws.

More chilling were the two ladies and their Cuddle Dry products. They hadn't taken the Dragons' offer, preferring to keep more of the equity in their own hands. The ladies were working on their exit strategy and looking at becoming serial entrepreneurs.

I fear this is the way you make money. Don't become attached. Build the business quickly and then flog it to step up to the next enterprise. Eventually you turn into a Dragon.

Jealous, moi? I'm just biding my time and manicuring my claws.

Sand in my e-reader

The debate about e-readers and e-books rumbles on in the Bookseller with Transworld setting the new Dan Brown e-book at £18.99. Seems a huge price to me and I have made a couple of comments.

What I don't quite figure out is why Transworld don't make the e-book exclusive on their site only. Don't let it go to Amazon or anyone else. Anyone who is buying a download will home in on it there. Then Transworld don't have to give a hefty discount to Amazon or anyone else and they can afford to let their loyal customers have it at a reasonable price (nearer the £5 mark). That way the publisher makes money and pleases the customer and retains some power over digital content.

Aren't people always going to buy e-books online rather than visit a bookshop? If so, the publisher should build up their e-shops and not let anyone else have them.

And finally, have the e-reader manufacturers tried lying on a beach with their e-reader? Won't they get awfully hot to hold and in danger of clogging up with sand?

The great e-book debate

Check out this really interesting article and comments at the Bookseller about e-books. I especially agree with the comment by Daphne. If publishers don't come up with an across-the- industry strategy, then they will ultimately lose out to the likes of Amazon who will set the terms and take a huge slice for themselves.

What users want is a reader that works and one that allows them to read all books - novels and illustrated non-fiction. That should be a given. All the publishers should adhere to this format.

If anyone lives in a family of mobile phone users, how many drawers are full of tangled-up chargers? The e-reader should be charged by something universal. Hopefully the Europe-wide charger that is about to be launched.

When I caught sight of my first e-reader - on a bus from Tremezzo to Como, looking over the shoulder of the man reading it - I noticed that he scrolled down what looked like a book page. At the foot of each page was a line of small text, presumably stating it was the bottom of the page. This seems clunky but as with many people who yack on about e-readers, I haven't actually held one so I don't know if this is the norm.

I personally think that the market for e-readers will be boys, men and students. Women will use them for information (recipes, dictionaries, DIY, helping children with schoolwork, etc) rather than leisure. I could be wrong about this, but it is gut instinct.

The human e-reader is going to be web-savvy, know where to get things for free. It is therefore important to set a price that they are willing to pay, not what the publisher thinks it deserves. Maybe the solution is to adopt a loan system. After all, it is not like an e-book is something you can keep on a shelf.

Why not offer them for rent for £2 or £3 or £4 as well as for firm sale. The rent should last 3 months after which the e-book will eat itself.

Publishers need much more imput from their staff to come up with a creative solution. They have to think much more laterally. They should test out current e-readers on interested staff and find out what they like and don't like about them and how they can be improved. That is just the start. But if they don't hurry up, someone outside the industry will come up with a winner.

When I was at HarperCollins they brought in a speaker to motivate us. He said something that has stayed with me. The story told of how he was a spotty short teenager living in the Welsh mountains and was in love with Lisa, the lovely tall girl in his class. He had personality, but what use is that when you are a spotty short Welsh boy? Then as he was walking by a shoe shop window he saw the answer to his dilemma - red (with blue laces) four-inch platform shoes. At last Lisa was in his reach. Prior to walking by the shoe shop he had no idea that this was the answer to his dream, he would never in a million years have come up with this as a solution. That is genius marketing - providing a product that your customers were completely unaware that they wanted. Apologies to the man who told this story. I forget this name.