Google (GOOG) has seen its fair share of troubles in China, from having its flagship search engine blocked to being scolded for peddling pornography. Last week, the Chinese Written Works Copyright Society accused the company of infringing the rights of Chinese authors through its Google Books project.

And the drama continues. Now, the Web site of the People’s Daily is accusing Google of “malicious revenge” after Google searches for the People’s Daily Online’s books section turned up warnings that read: “This site may contain malicious software that could harm your computer.”

An article posted on the People’s Daily books page, from the Beijing Times (in Chinese), quoted an official with the People’s Daily site as saying he had received numerous calls from readers who said they were unable to access the site through Google. The unnamed official said there was no harmful software on the site, and that he believed the block was due to the site’s reporting of the Google Books story. The site began featuring stories on the rights-infringement issue on Oct. 21, and even created a special page on the subject. “Starting on the 21st [we] were maliciously blocked,” the official said, according to the report.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Google’s (GOOG) troubles in China seem to have taken a new turn as a result of the company’s plan to create a vast digital library of books.

The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) has called on Chinese writers to stand up for their legal rights in the face of Web search giant Google’s proposed book settlement, according to a post published on the official Web site of Chinese Writers’ Association (CWA).

CWWCS claimed to have found copyrighted works written by a number of Chinese writers scanned and posted to Google’s digital library, Google Books.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.

Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices–pages bound between covers–in the late Roman period.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Apple Inc. (AAPL) said Thursday it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.

App developers said they received an e-mail notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.

The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Tatyana Ray has more than 1,200 Facebook friends, sends 600 texts a month and participated in four student clubs during the year and a half she attended high school online, through a program affiliated with Stanford University.

Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun. Last winter, Ms. Ray left the online school and enrolled at a local community college for a semester.

Tatyana Ray has spent most of her high school career in online school.

“Socially, it wasn’t working,” she says. “I felt I was missing out.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

It could change–and probably will when the first flurry is over–but, as I type, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest thriller The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy’s True Compass, the other hot book release this week, can’t be bought via Kindle or Sony (NYSE: SNE) or as an e-book at all.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to Google’s (GOOG) “settlement” with authors and publishers over its book scanning project. I’m on the record as being very much against the settlement, but for very different reasons than most people. Frankly, I think Google’s book scanning project is an incredibly useful and culturally valuable project, that will help expand culture and knowledge sharing. So my main complaint with the “settlement” is why it’s needed at all.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Librarians call it the 20th-century black hole. The overwhelming force is not gravity but copyright law, sucking our collective culture into a vortex from which it can never escape.

That culture includes millions of books Google wants to make available online. But many are concerned. The European Commission will hold hearings on Monday, while a US judge has extended the deadline for objections to a proposed US legal settlement.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

You might argue that Sony (SNE) was visionary. In the fall of 2006, it introduced the first eBook with an E Ink screen–long before Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle rolled out with the same technology. The Sony Reader also connected users to an online store, solving a problem that had long bedeviled the e-book market–how do you get books onto your new device?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In the future, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Hyperion is taking a stab at online publishing with the launch of Kernl, an “e-imprint” it will use to quickly release combinations of text and video.

Kernl looks like a Web video player, with standard viewing and sharing options, but also includes tabs with related text and links. It debuts Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America”–which, like Hyperion, is owned by Walt Disney (DIS)–with a segment on job-hunting. A more detailed article and links to sample resumes and other resources will be posted on the show’s Web site. It is the first in a 10-part Kernl series that will air weekly and reside on a section of ABCnews.com.

Ellen Archer, president and publisher of Hyperion, said the initiative is a way for the book publisher to take advantage of the Web’s immediacy. “With the evolving world of publishing, I think one of the things we can address so beautifully on the Internet is news that you need to know now. Print books just can’t get onto the shelves fast enough,” she said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As a few more libraries begin lending the Kindle, the e-book reading device from Amazon (AMZN), the company continues to offer ambiguous messages regarding its policies. Asked by the Howe Library, Hanover, NH, if it was OK to lend a Kindle, an Amazon support staffer said yes–and the library has proceeded to do so, with much positive response.

Read the rest of this post

Last October, Google (GOOG) settled the lawsuit brought against it by book publishers and authors concerning its massive book-scanning project. The $125 million deal gives Google the right to store digital copies of the books, include them in its search results, sell online versions and license its book-scans to libraries. It also allows millions of “orphan” works (books still under copyright but whose copyright-holders can’t be found) to be included in Google’s program.

Read the rest of this post