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…

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 2, of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Corduroy Mansions in Cyberspace: Online Novels and Their Implications to Print Publishing and the Traditional Novel by Jaime Robles.
• Features of Scholarly Publishing in Small Multilingual Publishing Markets: The Case of Greece by Christina Banou.
• The Impact of Cinema on the Contemporary Francophone Novel by Lucille Roy-Hewitson.
• Exploring Occupational Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books by Cindy Hendricks, James Hendricks, Trinka Messenheimer, M Sue Houston and Julian Williford.
• Books versus e-Books: The Indian Perspective by Basavadatta Mitra, Nishant Singh, H.S. Ramya, Adwait Gandhe and Vivek Jha.

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 2, of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Is Bibliography Reactionary? by Vincent Giroud.
• If u txt 2 much, duz it mean u cant spell: Exploring the Connection between SMS Use and Lowered Performance in Spelling by Rosalind Raymond Gann, Karin Bartoszuk and Jillian H. Anderson.
• The Conditions Required to Enable the Reader to Approach a Text by Gilly Perel-Dayan.
• Brand Concepts in Publishing by Irini Pitsaki.
• Finding American Ideals in Early Primers by Laurie Andes.

Steve Jobs discussing the iBooks application for the Apple iPad at its debut in San Francisco, January 27, 2010 (Tom Avelar/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

From Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter’s overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

For the full article…

The second issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Book is now available.

Volume 7, Number 2 includes:

• Travels with More’s Utopia: Provenance Discovery through Marginalia and Annotations by Robin Smith.
• Young Adult Fiction in 1980s (West) Germany The Paperback Series “Rororo Panther” (Rowohlt) “Problem-oriented Novels” for Young Adult Readers by Corinna Norrick.
• Ghosts between the Pages: The Devolution of Medb from Sovereignty Goddess to Comic Book Villainess and the Potential Dangers of the Transcription of Oral Tales by Megan Amber Condis.
• Media Rich PDF Publishing: Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Print and Multimedia Publishing by Jason Lisi.
• Disruptive Innovations in Book Publishing - Threat or Opportunity? by Bozena Izabela Mierzejewska.

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…

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

From Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired.com’s Epicenter:

Now, the hard part.

Before it existed, Apple’s iPad was infused with the wishful expectations of a thousand hopeful constituencies, none with more at stake than a host of media businesses still grappling to find a killer app in the digital domain. Now that we know what the iPad does, though, it’s still an open question how the much-heralded device will actually improve their fortunes.

The good news is that book publishers, magazine publishers, newspapers, the recorded-music industry, television studios, game developers and film studios — all of whom need some form of lifeline, some desperately — each have a place at the iPad table.

But in the advertiser-supported niches, print analogs still command higher advertising revenues than their digital equivalents. So, the question will turn on two issues: Will publishers get to control the customer relationship to a greater extent than has been possible with iTunes? And will publications be the kind of shiny eye candy that advertisers crave, but now delivered on a bright, crisp, LED-backlit touchscreen instead of heavy-stock glossy paper.

For the article…

From Brad Stone at The New York Times…

One of the most significant applications for the iPad may be Apple’s own creation, called iBooks, an e-reading program that will connect to Apple’s new online e-bookstore.

Mr. Jobs said Apple so far had relationships with five major publishers — Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan — and was eager to make deals with others. Publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction books.

Apple’s announcement that it was diving into the growing e-book business put the company on a collision course with Amazon. Mr. Jobs credited Amazon with pioneering e-readers with the Kindle but said “we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.”

John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who serves on Amazon’s board and is also an adviser to Apple, said there could be room for both companies, noting that Amazon sells many books to iPhone owners who use its Kindle application, which will also work on the iPad.

“I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to leave the e-book business,” he said, referring to Amazon’s chief executive, “and I don’t think it will be confined to the Kindle.” For more and 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…

The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 1, of The International Journal of the Book includes:

• Rabelais Unsheathes the Book: The Linguistic Critique Offered by the Catalog of Saint-Victor’s by Brett Bodemer.
• The Role of Readers in the Process of Creating Australian Fiction: A Case Study for Rethinking the Way We Understand and Foster Creativity by Elizabeth Paton.
• The Muse in Mourning: Or Why the Author Mopes and Starves in a Garret by Kenneth DiMaggio.
• Developing Key Concepts for the Design of Hypertext for Printed Books by Claire Timpany.
• The Critical Theory Digital Archive by Erin Obodiac.