Mr. Newton: Our core business is the exploitation of copyright, and our primary medium is the book. We have a thriving book division which publishes many of the world's greatest authors. Our territory is very much the high ground of literary fiction, and we're fortunate to be the publishers of many top authors including many great North American authors from David Guterson, whose book, 'East of the Mountains,' following up his 'Snow Falling on Cedars,' we've just published, John Irving, where we published a year ago his brilliant 'A Widow for One Year,' and many of his previous books, Michael Ondaatje's 'The English Patient,' and many of Margaret Atwood's novels, and Jay McInerney's 'Model Behaviour,' and a number of his previous books. Many of the world's greatest novelists choose to be on the Bloomsbury list. In addition to our thriving and growing book division, which is fortunate to be the publisher of the number one best selling book in the world at the moment, J.K. Rowling's children's series, 'Harry Potter,' 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' is currently number one on the U.K. best seller list, having come out on July the 8th, and it's coming out on September the 8th in the U.S.A. In addition to the book division, we have Bloomsbury's Reference and Electronic Media division. And the fourth of August 1999 marks the simultaneous worldwide publication in America, England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Germany and India, of the Encarta World English Dictionary, which is the fruit of a collaboration between Bloomsbury and Microsoft together with the U.S. publisher, St. Martin's Press, and Macmillan in Australia to create the world's first digitally compiled dictionary of English viewed as the language of the world. Now all previous dictionaries have been very much rooted in the cultural perspective of the nation where the defining was taking place, whether that was Britain, or America, or Australia, and indeed, this was the right approach for previous times. However, the statistics of the growth of English are explosive. At present, 750 million people speak English as a first or second language. And a further 1 billion people are learning it, and that figure of 1.75 billion people is just over a quarter of the world's present population of 6 billion. However, our own estimates to the time when the millennium babies are becoming the leaders of their society in the year 2050 indicate that over 50% of the world's then population, that is to say, 4.2 billion people out of a projected 7.96 billion people will have competence in English. The implications of this are breathtaking. The opportunities, at a commercial level, for a publishing organisation such as ours to seize that opportunity while it's growing are quite exceptional. We have produced with Microsoft a dictionary which defines the many different versions of English used all over the world, whilst at the same time creating localised editions of that world English so that this work will mean as much to a person in Milwaukee as it does to someone in Melbourne or in Manchester. Indeed, the Encarta World English Dictionary is the first bilingually compiled database of the English language. The American edition compilation effort was led by the distinguished American lexicographer Anne H. Soukhanov, whose previous work was the American Heritage Dictionary. Anne H. Soukhanov has made this a brilliant dictionary for Americans and one where as with the English edition, the advanced orders in anticipation of publication on the fourth of August are nothing short of huge.
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