I was on a plane.

So, while you wretched lot were boozing it up at the FutureBook Conference, listening to Charlie Redmayne tell you true things about branding and all kinds of other coolness, I was doing a seven and a half hour prison sentence with a furious fifteen month old and a vast quantity of projectile humous. You lucky lucky lucky lucky lucky people.

The takeaways (I have used this word; I now wish I never had, so that I could disparage it as stinky and eebil) seem to have been pretty much exactly the ones I would have wished, supporting the thesis that you should just let people get on with it rather than trying to persuade them of anything. The ongoing discussion about digital also seems to be going in good directions elsewhere.

But there are still a couple of things which maybe need to be said aloud:

1. "accounting structures" are not a good reason to do anything. More specifically, the argument that it is hard to bundle ebooks and paper books for sale together because many publishers account them separately? A very bad argument. Movies and comics are now sold like this. Why? Because it's the logical way to sell media in a digital age.

2. We are doing really well catching up - yay! - but catching up is not enough. We have to take the field and make it ours again - urgh! I had a fascinating but frustrated conversation with some booksellers recently, and we designed the perfect bookselling environment in our heads: in-store wireless, apps, dedicated reader. Stalk through the store, buy paper books. Identify books you might want, scan of photograph them to your app, get offered prequels, sequels, other books by the same author, similar books. Get offered electronic versions, bundles, 1-day paper delivery to your home if they're not in stock. People like to walk through bookshops. They do not always buy the books at the time, and indeed they do make lists for subsequent purchase online. That is not good. Harness it!

3. I still believe that a distributed sales system where the reader of a book can recommend it and benefit in a small way - reward points? discounts? - from any subsequent sale to the person to whom they recommended it would be a killer app.

More anon - but in the mean time, it's great to be back in London. Hope you all had a lovely first week of December. And I'm sad to have missed what I hear was some really great post-Futurebook dancing. (Yes, I know who you are.)

NH