 I am the Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing and I'm based in London and responsible for our activities worldwide in trade publishing and in various other aspects. What makes a good publisher? That's a terrifically difficult question to answer even if I try myself. We spot talent or we try to. We manipulate that talent to make it better. We encourage authors to write or we edit, we change and then we do what the etymological route of publishing is, which is publicize. We tell the world that this exists. We then collect the money on behalf of the author and send it to the author and then rotate and we try to make a small profit on the way. Part of our role is to put readers in touch with authors and authors in touch with readers clearly. However, it's a bit more sophisticated than that and particularly in the digital world. We have to facilitate platform creation, we have to facilitate navigation. It's easy enough to spot a good author from a bad author. And it's easy enough to spot something that is potentially saleable from something that is clearly unsaleable. But within those parameters, what turns a book about an Afganistani boy from selling 1,000 copies to selling 4 million in the case of the kite runner? Who knows? People say about Harry Potter that it only happens once in a blue moon. Actually, I think it only happens once in 500 years since the beginning of printing. Of course it's introduced reading and the joy of reading and literacy to a huge number of young people. I think Joe Rowling has done the world a terrific favour. This digital revolution we're going through at the moment in general book publishing. I think it's the greatest opportunity for a generation to transform our business for a number of reasons. One is that for the first time we can reach our potential customers 24x7 and they can buy. They can be in Jakarta, they can be in Buenos Aires, they can be in Chicago. We can reach them and they can buy. So that's fantastic. The second is environmental and both physical environmental and psychological environmental. We don't have to chop trees down. We don't have to buy petrol to drive the books around and worse still when they don't sell, drive them back. I think from a third point of view it's to do with speed. It takes a year from a manuscript arriving to being published. That's too slow. Taste changes hourly, daily, minutely, weekly. So I think this opportunity to change the speed of the industry is just incredibly challenging and interesting. I don't think we know how to do it but we better learn. In terms of winners and losers out on the digital thing, I think that some retail, bricks and mortar retailers are going to have to find new ways of running their businesses because it's hard to see what their role is up against the big internet retailers. The second big challenge is for public libraries in particular. I believe they're really important for social, educational, cultural reasons and their demise will be disastrous. They have to find better ways of reaching out to their community and more cost effective ones. Digital gives them that. We run a thing called public library online which is an online service for libraries where they can buy themed bookshelves and anyone in their community can read them at home or any which way, any internet enabled device. We started in England because that's where we are. We've now launched it in Germany, in America, in Australia and frankly it can be in any language and any place and we're talking to our colleagues in the publishing industry worldwide. I think there is an opportunity to create something really important. Wouldn't it be great if the richest people in the world, women and men, funded some international public library system? It just needs a little catalyst and it's not hugely expensive because digital distribution doesn't require bricks and mortar and it doesn't require huge amounts of working capital. It requires the authors to write and be paid and a little bit of imagination. Copyright is, to my mind, incredibly flexible and works. It works. We can give stuff away if it's the right thing to do. We can charge for things. We can guarantee that nothing gets power or try to guarantee that things don't get pirated although piracy is an issue. But it works. It rewards the right people, it stimulates us but every time someone gets up and says I think all information should be free, it's damaging. There's an aphorism that an old publishing friend of mine used to say which is where information is free, there is little freedom of information. And I think there's something to be said for that. Someone's paying and if it's not you, you don't know what their motives are. One of the important things about copyright is its flexibility and like in Tokyo where the skyscrapers bend a little bit and that actually allows them to stand up and withstand earthquakes. I think a little bit of bending is no bad thing within the copyright context and I think Wiper has been very good at getting that balance between bending a bit but there are certain things you don't move on. Is there a future of print books? Is one of those questions that come up frequently? Yes. I'm sure there will be. However, we'd be crazy to think that there won't be some reduction in the number of print books but equally there will be a market for books. There are many reasons to be careful letting publishers in pretty good health because intellectual property has a real value. Sometimes undervalued or it's perceived value but it really does have value and people seem to be willing to pay for it. I wanted to be a journalist and the easiest way to become a journalist was to get a National Union of Journalists card by getting into book publishing. I could not have been luckier. It's been that marvelous time.