Books, as in real books, seem to be making something of a comeback but not in a conventional way.
While book stores are full of the latest blockbuster novels retailing at increasingly higher prices, Google, Apple and Amazon.com are working away on their projects which could mean an exciting time for a generation used to getting their information online - and immediately.
Amazon.com will soon being selling e-books for reading on Apple's popular iPhone and iPod Touch.
Starting in the United States last week, some owners of those Apple devices started downloading a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple's App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best-sellers.
The move came a week after Amazon started shipping the updated versions of its Kindle reading device.
According to commentator Brad Stone, the move signalled the company might be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.
Meanwhile, Google caused some raising of eyebrows when an email message turned up at the offices of The Cook Islands News. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper which has a circulation of 2500.
The newspaper's editor, John Woodes, was quoted as being amazed and sceptical of the advertisement. But everyone was even more surprised when Google owned up to paying for the advertisement.
The online giant had been sued in the US federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $US125 million ($NZ260 million) to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages.
Copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first, they must be found.
Since copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online - given how many books are old or out of print - it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-internet age: print.
A dedicated website about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals with at least one advertisement in each country.
The New York Times reported that those efforts made it among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.
So far, more than 200 advertisements have run in more than 70 languages: in highbrow periodicals such as the New York Review of Books and the Poetry Review, in Britain; in general interest publications like USA Today; obscure foreign trade journals like China Copyright; and in newspapers in places like Fiji, Greenland, the Falkland Islands and the Micronesian Islands.
The irony is that Google is having to spend so much money, about $US7 million, on taking out print advertisements.
Apparently, authors and publishers are hard to track down, more than members of most settlement classes. Kinsella Media, in Washington, said the company created a list of countries to target for the advertising campaign and hired a company to run the telephone line that takes calls.
That raised its own problems such as how to handle calls in more than 80 languages around the world, how did you staff that operation and whether it was worth having someone able to speak French on duty all of the time?Back at Amazon, a spokesman was quoted as saying its Kindle reader and devices like the iPhone, were seen as complementary and that people would use their mobile phones to read books only for short periods, such as in a supermarket queue.
People would still turn to standalone reading devices, like the $US359 Kindle, when they wanted to read digital books for hours at a time.
Amazon also believed that the experience of using the new iPhone application might persuade people to buy a Kindle, which had a much longer battery life than the iPhone and a screen better suited for reading.
With all of the online interest in books, book reading devices and tracking down authors, some new opportunities could be opening up for authors and readers alike. One of the problems to overcome for Amazon.com and Google, and others, is that Mack-Line researched this column completely online.
No trees were destroyed in the process.
