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The latest issue of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Chinese Language Books as Medium of Re-presentation, Alphabet-based Books as Medium of Representation and the Paradigm of Medical Practices by Rey Tiquia.
• Post-desktop Publishing: An Interactive Book for an Era of Ubiquitous Digitality. The Implications of Intelligent and Pervasive Book Forms by Eleanor Dare.
• Media Influence on the Family Storytelling Experience by Connie S. Eigenmann-Malik.
• Open Access and Web 2.0 in the Academy: Changing and Exchanging Scholarship in Children’s Literature by David Beagley.
• Re-thinking Nature, Fact and Fiction: University of Queensland Press’ Environmental List 1965-1995 by Deborah Jordan.
• The Rise of the Illustrated YA Novel: Challenges to Form and Ideology by Pamela Macintyre.
• A Wide Enough World but No Time: Empathy, Emersion, and Concentration in the Electronic Age by Kathleen Ochshorn.
• Causes of Low Literacy Rate in Pakistan: A Survey Based Study by Ashiq Hussain and Naseer Ahmad Salfi.

From Miguel Helft in the New York Times:

In another blow to Google’s plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

In a 31-page filing that could influence a federal judge’s ruling on the settlement, the department said the new agreement was much improved from an earlier version. But it said the changes were not enough to placate concerns that the deal would grant Google a monopoly over millions of orphan works, meaning books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.

The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.

The revised agreement “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation,” the department wrote.

The department asked the court to encourage the parties to continue discussions on further changes to the settlement, which it said had many public benefits.

For the full article…

Amazon will roll out an updated Kindle. Publishers and readers are likely to choose between it and an Apple tablet computer.

From Brad Stone and Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a formidable high-tech face-off: Amazon.com versus Apple for the hearts and minds of book publishers, authors and readers.

Amazon’s Kindle devices and electronic bookstore now dominate a nascent but booming market, accounting for more than 70 percent of electronic reader sales and 80 percent of e-book purchases, according to some analysts. And on Thursday it will take a page from Apple and announce that it is opening up the Kindle to outside software developers.

Apple’s much-anticipated tablet computer, which is widely expected to be announced next Wednesday and go on sale this spring, will be a far more versatile (and expensive) device that will offer access to books, newspapers and other reading material through Apple’s popular App Store on iTunes.

…

But publishers can anticipate another high-tech heavyweight entering the business: Google, which has pushed its own plans to begin selling e-books.

“The more companies that control consumer transactions, the more important the publishers’ role will be,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idealog, which helps publishers develop digital strategies. “If Apple enters this market, and in three months Google follows, we may be looking at a completely different e-book world in the next year.”

For more…

From John Carlo Bertot, Paul T. Jaeger, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, and Elise Jensen,

The findings … demonstrate that public libraries continue to expand the public access computing and Internet services and training available to patrons. As has been the case for several years, virtually all public libraries are connected to and offer public access to the Internet, with an increasing number offering wireless access as well. The vast majority also offer a range of services and training related to the Internet. While patron and community demand for Internet access, training, and services is so routinely extensive that most libraries cannot meet these needs during normal times, the unprecedented economic downturn has further stressed library resources through reduced operating hours and more demand for library services and resources — particularly Internet–based services (CNN, 2009). In addition, libraries continue to struggle with issues of infrastructure as the types of Internet–related services become more complex and bandwidth–intensive, require a range of building technology upgrades, and continual staff skills development.

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From Emma Jackson at University World News:

The University of Michigan’s library has partnered with Booksurge, a print-on-demand service owned by Internet retailer Amazon, to make thousands of rare and out-of-print books available for one-off printing through digitisation.

Customers will be able to browse more than 400,000 titles on Amazon.com where the digital files can be printed on demand by Booksurge and shipped to the buyer in as little as two days.

All of the titles are public domain and were scanned into digital files through the university’s internal scanning programme and a partnership with search engine Google over the last five years.

According to Maria Bonn, director of scholarly publishing at the library, more than 3 million titles have been scanned. More…