The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.
From BBC News…
Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.
There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.
The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence. More…
Denny Chin, a United States District Court judge, is overseeing the Google books case.
From Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, in The New York Times.
Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.
The settlement, of a 2005 lawsuit over Google’s ambitious plan to digitize books from major American libraries, outlined a plan to create a comprehensive database of in-print and out-of-print works. But the original agreement, primarily between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, drew much criticism.
The Justice Department and others said Google was potentially violating copyright law, setting itself up to unfairly control access to electronic versions of older books and depriving authors and their heirs of proper compensation.
To read more…
From Bruce McCall Vanity Fair
Hotel rooms now provide Gideon Bibles only as pay-per-view TV channels. Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles. The Cassandra Report forecasts that more than fifty warehouses across the U.S., long used as book storage and shipping centers, will shortly be converted to video-game facilities. Rare-book collectors are switching to classic Betamax movie videos of the 1970s and 1980s.
Dire omens indeed, in line with a recent survey that found that more than half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in the previous year—doubtless a conservative figure, because everybody lies about their reading habits. The trend toward a bookless society is gaining almost daily as a TV-besotted, iPhone-bedazzled, time-starved, speed-crazed populace becomes ever less willing to seek information and entertainment by concentrating their minds on endless lines of type.
More….
Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, Books and Publishing.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
- individually and jointly authored books;
- edited collections addressing a clear, intellectually challenging theme;
- collections of papers published in The International Journal of the Book.
Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Congratulations to John W. Warren, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper Innovation and the Future of e-Books.
Abstract: The technological development and cultural acceptance of e-books today parallels the state of the printed book in the 15th century. E-books are increasingly available from a variety of distributors and retailers, and work on a myriad of devices, but the majority remain simply digitized versions of print books. Some devices or platforms include such tools as word definitions, highlighting, and note taking, but many of these tools simply mimic what students and researchers have traditionally done with printed texts.
This paper examines three examples of innovative e-books in order to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. The first is a history e-text that includes 1,700 primary-source documents—such as Presidential memos, reports, and even audio and video clips—linked from footnotes, providing a treasure trove of research material to readers. The second is a novella in hypertext form. The third example examines digital textbooks that include multimedia, assessment, and other digital tools. Each of these cases demonstrates creative approaches, business models, and methods of review that point to the enhanced, interactive, interlinked future of the e-book.
