So far, book publishing has been spared that fate. ''The book publishing business has had a front-row seat to see what happened to the music industry.'' ''The book business model is under siege, just as the music industry earlier came under siege,'' said Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a Silicon Valley company that helps people publish their own books, using the Internet. In some cases they are racing against Internet startups that have similar ideas. Meanwhile, publishers are moving ahead with a flurry of digital initiatives, tapping the Internet for the marketing, distribution and even the creation of books. Early printings of his work, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France? They are, too. Letters from Mozart to his friends, from the Austrian National Library in Vienna? They're there. This month, a group of European national libraries and archives plans to open Europeana, an online database of two million books and other cultural and historical items, including films, paintings, newspapers and sound recordings. But the agreement is only one of many initiatives under which books are making what may be the biggest technological leap since Gutenberg invented the printing press. court, and the bookshop would operate only in the United States for now. The settlement remains subject to approval by a U.S. ''So almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet,'' wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London, on his blog.

The deal allows Google to sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print, a category that includes the vast majority of the world's books. Last week, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over the company's Book Search program, under which Google is scanning millions of books and making their contents available on the Internet. The world of books is going digital, too. Long after other media had joined the digital revolution - in some cases only after suffering its ravages - book publishers clung to the reassuringly low-tech tools of printing press, paper and ink.Ī year later, that bastion is starting to yield. PARIS (IHT) - Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of, asked last November as his company unveiled the Kindle, a portable, electronic book-reading device.

The last bastion 1984