Mr. Norris said that in 2008, 56 percent of adults in the United States bought at least one print book. In 2009 the number increased to 57 percent.

"The hype never matches up with reality," Mr. Norris said. "There's money to be made in e-books. There's money to be made in print books too. There's no reason why publishers shouldn't pursue both and just not let the hyperbole get out of control."

The policy has both long-term and short-term targets. By 2012, Hachette plans to raise the use of recycled fiber from 3% to 30%, with a majority of the fiber to be postconsumer. Hachette also intends to have FSC-certified papers account for at least 20% of paper use by 2012. 2020 is the target date for Hachette to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% and to reduce its carbon footprint 2% per year off of a 2008 baseline.

*****

Other aspects of the environmental policy include avoiding the use of paper sourced from any ancient or endangered forests, using paper that has been bleached without the use of chlorine, and using inks with low contents of volatile organic compounds. Hachette also hopes to reduce the number of books in landfills by improving projections of consumer demand, increasing the use of on-demand printing, and working with retailers to lower returns.

The two works are The Imitation Game, a biography of mathematician Alan Turing by comics writer and science biographer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Purvis; and Red Light Properties by Dan Goldman, described as a "paranormal real estate tale" by literary agent Bob Mecoy of Creative Book Services, who represents all the creators and negotiated the deal on their behalf.

The two works were acquired by Tor.com producer Pablo Defendini, who described the acquistions as part of Tor.com's mandate to experiment with nontraditional publishing strategies. But he also emphasized that the acquisition also highlights how important and popular comics have become on the site, which he also said will be redesigned and relaunched in 2010..

Goldberg, who will start at the travel publisher in March and work out of its Melbourne, Australia, office, arrives from Dow Jones where he was senior v-p of digital strategy and operations overseeing a number of the brand's Web sites including WSJ.com and Barrons.com. Goldberg's task at Lonely Planet, as per a statement from parent company BBC, is to be the lead on its "multiplatform growth strategy."

Speaking to the hire, Marcus Arthur, BBC Worldwide's MD of Global Brands, said: "I've no doubt that Matt's expertise will not only help maintain Lonely Planet's core business in printed travel guides, but will also seek to optimize opportunities in alternative media markets as the business enters the next phase of its digital development." Before Dow Jones, Goldberg was at Bertelsmann where on, among other things, he directed its cross platform media efforts. BBC acquired Lonely Planet in late 2007.

1. The popularity of e-books will increase, with titles formatted for Amazon's Kindle leading the way. Content for the Sony Reader will sell faster than ever, but by this time next year, Kindle-compatible books will be outselling them by more than 2 to 1. And Palm, which has historically been the bestselling format, will have had its best year-on-year increase as well. Powells.com, which offers the largest selection of titles in formats that are not in closed distribution (a total of 150,000 in Adobe, Microsoft and Palm so far) will also have a record year for e-book sales. By year end, nearly every straight-text title published with commercial intent will be available for Kindle; the trick for the other formats will be to make sure they're included, too. And Kindle pricing will drive the market. But despite the fast growth, e-books will still make up a tiny share of the market—no more than 2% of sales for most titles—and will contribute only a minimal amount to publishers' bottom lines.

2. Sales of books in electronic form to public libraries will continue to grow: Ingram's MyiLibrary, Follett, NetLibrary and Overdrive are already deep into this business. This opportunity will present a challenge as publishers discover that some older contracts don’t give them the right to make that kind of sale.

Since I spoke to you a month ago about the economic crisis and its impact on our company, I can’t say much has changed. We are now clearly in a recession and there is still no clarity on how long or deep it will be. What is clear is that retail book sales are down, advertising revenues are down, and even countercyclical businesses like education are struggling in many cases. We are not immune to these forces, and our business continues to be soft. So the time has come to take action for next year.

Effective January 1st for 2009 we will freeze salaries for everyone making more than $50,000. For those making under $50,000 there will be a pool for modest increases. All bonus plans will stay in effect, but all are sensitive to individual company profitability and individual performance. Thus the impact on individual bonus plans will vary.

British writers were yesterday coming to terms with the death of the doyenne of the London literary scene, Pat Kavanagh, paying tribute to her strength of spirit, tenacity and straight-talking.

Kavanagh, 68, who was married to the novelist Julian Barnes, was at the summit of her profession, representing writers including Ruth Rendell, Margaret Drabble, Robert Harris, Joanna Trollope, Andrew Motion, Clive James, and Wendy Cope. What the writers had in common was their fierce loyalty to their agent, who died yesterday morning from a brain tumour.

The novelist Robert Harris - a client for 27 years - said everyone was reeling from her loss. "She was fantastically efficient and just the person you wanted to have represent you. There was no one quite like her really. And she was exotic, like a bird of paradise. She was unflappable and she didn't let you get above yourself.

"She always described herself as being like a family doctor or a country solicitor. She didn't believe in trying to screw an enormous amount of money out of publishers. Pat was always quite indiscreet and very funny and you know, in a world full of bs, there was no bs from Pat. She didn't suck up to her writers."

That jaw-dropping sum got the house world English rights, which means they'll be able to publish the book-described to Media Mob as a collection of comedic "rants" -- through any of their international units and sell whatever rights they don't want to other publishers.

Because Mr. Brand is a much bigger star in England than he is anywhere else, the UK unit is covering the lion's share of that massive advance, our source said. Stateside, the book will be published through HC's Collins division and overseen by editor Gillian Blake.

Mr. Brand, who is currently working on a second movie with Mr. Apatow and recently wrapped one with Adam Sandler, published a raucous memoir last year about his addiction to drugs and sex that was a huge bestseller in the UK. That book, entitled My Booky Wook, originally involved a ghostwriter, but Mr. Brand didn't like what he saw of a first draft and decided to write it himself -- in Tuscany! -- over the course of about a month.

The world's largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company's plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

Unlike Google, whose decision to scan books still protected under copyright law has provoked multiple lawsuits, Microsoft stuck to scanning books with the permission of publishers or that were firmly in the public domain.

The company said it will give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed.

Microsoft's search engine is a distant third behind Google's and Yahoo's, in terms of the number of queries performed each month, despite the company's many attempts to emulate Google's innovative search features and create some of its own.

Doubleday has acquired North American rights to bestselling Shadow of the Wind author Carlos Ruiz Zafon's new book, following an intense seven figure auction that came to a head when Doubleday's publisher, Steve Rubin, found himself facing off against Deb Futter, the new editor-in-chief of Grand Central Publishing's adult division whom Mr. Rubin trained in the ways of the business when she worked for him. Both Mr. Rubin and Ms. Futter were apparently in the auction-- conducted by Tom Colchie on behalf of Spanish-based literary agent Antonia Kerrigan-- until the very end.

Ms. Futter and had been working at Doubleday for many years, and serving as deputy editorial director there when she left for her new job. She started at Grand Central in January.

Alison Rich, the executive director of publicity at Doubleday, confirmed that Mr. Rubin had acquired the book, and that Doubleday editor-in-chief Bill Thomas will edit. Ms. Rich would not comment on the size of the advance.

Even by the standards of the book world, 2007 saw more hand-wringing than usual, as well as some unexpected good news. The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world.

A flurry of bookstores, especially independents, fell victim to the chains, big-boxes and Amazon.com. In Southern California, that meant the shuttering of Dutton's Beverly Hills, Book Soup's Orange County branch, Anaheim's Book Baron and several beloved used-book stores. Leimert Park's Eso Won Books and Pacific Palisades' Village Books are hanging on by the skin of their teeth: Village owner Katie McLaughlin said she's waiting to see how holiday sales go before deciding whether next year will be her store's last.

And because of price discounts, the final installment of the Harry Potter series didn't give many stores the shot in the arm they were hoping for. Even literacy itself, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts, seems to be on a slow but steady decline. Add to this the destabilizing and ever-increasing pace of change. "It's one of those years -- they come along every once in a while -- where everyone worries and pulls their hair," said Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.

There, we've done it. We've gone and changed the name of Holtzbrinck. Just like that, we're Macmillan. Actually, we've been talking inside about the name change for so long — over a year now — that it's somehow shocking to see it finally happen. Of course, this is much more than just a name change. (Although, I confess that it will be nice that my English mother will finally know who I work for.)

In Macmillan, we in the US are adopting a name that Holtzbrinck has been known by internationally for years. But it's not only our business cards and boxes that are changing. That's the easy stuff. Underneath, we are shifting the way we think about how we do what we do.

And what do we do? We publish.

Yes, we publish books, magazines, and textbooks. But our role as publishers is not really to turn paper into books. It is to help creators find and connect with their audiences wherever they are. It is to publish information, entertainment, education, and ideas in whatever media and formats are appropriate. And through all the channels – digital and traditional – where our audience can be found.

[T]here is also schadenfreude and a tone of self-righteousness, a kind of group we-told-you-so that is almost biblical: at long last, the outsider, the sinner, has been punished for her sins. She went too far—what was the last straw? O.J., Mickey Mantle, her alleged anti-Semitic remarks?—and she was finally stopped. The rest of us are cleansed.

It's an understandable reaction and one for which, it must be said, PW is partly responsible. And yet, I can't help feeling that for all of our smugness, we may be in for a teaching moment of the be-careful-what-you-wish for variety. Regan and her eponymous imprint, after all, did serve an important, counterintuitive function: she published profitable junk that the rest of us would rather not touch. It served us all well to have Judith Regan and her questionable taste to react against;the truth is we needed her, if only to make ourselves feel better about our choices.

*****

Still, the common wisdom is that Regan simply had to go, that she had become a public embarrassment to her company and to all of publishing. While that's certainly true, I'm deeply skeptical about the suggestion that firing Regan means the book business has, at long last, re-found its soul. It's a business, after all, and if publishing to the lowest common denominator is what makes companies profitable, then that's the kind of publishing we're going to continue, at least sometimes, to do.

In the boldest of the new ventures, Random House, the nation's largest publisher, has formed a partnership with Focus Features, maker of such literary-based hits as "Brokeback Mountain," "The Constant Gardener" and "The Pianist." The publisher will not only open its vast holdings to the filmmaker, but it will also put up half the money for the movies that result, on projects costing up to $20 million. It marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has gambled on such a scale in Hollywood.

At HarperCollins, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., publishers recently announced a plan to transform books into television series through an aggressive in-house partnership with Fox TV Studios. Elsewhere, Penguin Group (USA) is allying itself with Walden Media to develop movies and television properties based on its books. Simon & Schuster, part of the corporate universe that includes CBS and Paramount, continues to pursue a host of book-to-movie projects, as does Hyperion, which is part of the conglomerate that includes Disney films and ABC.

"We're seeing a lot of new ventures because now, more than ever, content is king when it comes to movies and TV, and nobody has more content than the book world," said Samuel Craig, director of the entertainment, media and technology program at New York University's business school. With the book business flat for years, "the challenge for publishers is to find new ways to exploit material they already have, to tap into an entirely new source of revenue beyond book sales," Craig said.

For both big-name and obscure authors, new approaches to turning books into movies could also be very attractive. Currently, agents sell book and film rights to a manuscript separately, often at different times. But Dean Koontz, for example, sold the film rights for his latest thriller, "The Husband," to the Random House-Focus partnership because he was encouraged by the filmmaker's "courtesy and respect" in adapting his novel. "I haven't had that experience on previous adaptations of my books, to say the least," he said.

Jack (we'll call him Jack) arrived 10 minutes later. He's 50 years old and has the unmistakable aura of someone with an interesting and important job and an income of more than $200,000 a year... ....Jack's first words to me, after saying hello, were: "I don't have much time. One of my colleagues came up to me in the corridor just as I was leaving and said there was an important conference call I had to handle at 1.45 sharp." This is a very New York thing to say. I smiled and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was 12.40.

*****

He had no advice to offer on what was most saleable these days, other than to say that fiction was almost impossible to crack. Publishers were reluctant to give unknown authors a try, he said. This was because it had become so expensive to promote new talent. "All those piles of books you see when you walk through the front door of Borders or Barnes & Noble - those didn't get there by accident. Publishers paid through the nose for the space and, every couple of months, the price goes up again. I tell you, it's a tough sell."

Some of his books failed because they weren't as good as he hoped, he added, or because the market had moved on. But it could also be because the major chains refused to stock them - "not even if we pay them."

"Does that happen often?" I inquired, using chopsticks to negotiate my dim sum into an unfeasibly dinky container of soy sauce.

"More often than you'd think."

So it's the booksellers who are in the driving seat these days in America - just like in the UK.

Jack thought I might have more luck with non-fiction, but that everything depended on "platform" and having the right agent.

"Platform is key," he went on. "In New York, people want to know what your platform is before they'll even shake hands with you."