Her name is Penelope Trunk, and she is very, very cross.

You should read her post, every painful, angry second of it, and you should commit her words to memory and have them printed on a motivational poster to go on the wall of your meeting room.

She says conventional publishers simply do not understand and do not have the tools to work in an online environment, not just in the context of digital books, but paper books sold through digital outlets, which is more and more - even most of them. She points out that she can make more money selling someone else's book through her blog and the Amazon affiliates scheme than she can sending customers to her publisher's website to buy her book. She has a great deal to tell you on the subject of metrics and the social web not being a tv ad. It is very uncomfortable reading, but you need to read it.

If you cannot immediately counter every single thing she says - if you cannot happily and truthfully dismiss each problem she raises as something which could not possibly happen in your company - then you have a major problem. If you work in publishing and you have ever actually said any of the things she reports her prospective publisher saying; if you have ever, in the secret darkness of your soul, even considered saying them, then you should pay very close attention to what she does and says next. (Spoiler: she leaves.)

Anecdotally, the problems she identifies exist everywhere in our industry. My experience is markedly less dire, but not so blissfully perfect that I don't recognise the debates and frustrations. Customer data, in particular, is an issue. So is the lag between the completion of a book and the arrival of that book on the shelves. The amount of downtime I have to spend between books, first with editing and then doing bitty articles and appearances stretched out over months probably cuts my productivity in half. And money. Of course, and always: money. That wretched 25% ceiling on ebook royalties which is so mysteriously and so firmly adopted by every single big house and which is never persuasively explained; and the improbable mathematics of discounts; and ebook pricing vs paper pricing, which publishers maintain and authors have to explain to angry readers (if those readers don't simply turn up their noses at an ebook more expensive than its paper cousin and go spend their money elsewhere - remember the Ultimatum Game?)

And so on and so forth. Teleread, not always known for being gentle with publishing in reporting on the digital environment, tries hard to soft-pedal this piece. It's such a coruscating, blazing indictment that one wants to back away from it, find ways out of thinking about it. I think it's a staggering bit of writing and really important, but I still hate reading it.

And look what happens: she goes elsewhere. There are alternatives now to the battle she reports, and the longer the publishing industry fails to innovate boldly to recapture its connection with the reading public and its right - by conquest and by merit - to lead the book trade, the more of this will happen. She's a sign and a portent as well as a prophet.