European Union ministers are “expected to call for an investigation into whether Google has breached EU law.” According to a report on The Bookseller, “In a note circulated prior to today’s Competitiveness Council meeting, the German government said that Google had ’stolen a march’ on projects such as the EU’s Europeana project, by including digital versions of books in its library without obtaining copyright permission.”

The note further said other libraries have “lost ground” because of Google’s approach, which was “irreconcilable with the principles of European copyright law.” A “Czech presidency source” chimed in, saying “the more we speak about it, the more countries are concerned.”

A Reuters wire story, meanwhile, reports that the investigation is getting strong populist support among Germans: “A ‘Heidelberg Appeal’ has been launched in Germany claiming that intellectual property is being stolen from German authors,” in that Google has scanned innumerable books in U.S. libraries that have non-U.S. rights holders. A paper presented to EU industry ministers says, “Google’s actions are irreconcilable with the principles of European copyright law, according to which the consent of the author must be obtained before his or her works may be reproduced or made publicly available on the Internet.”.

According to Reuters, “Britain and France voiced support for Germany’s concerns.”

Well, it’s that time of year again: time for the muddle of ideas that is BookExpo America, which starts in New York City today. In a post on the IdeaLogical blog, Mike Shatzkin wonders aloud (my lips move when I read) how many more there will be: “It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart, it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.”

He also remembers back to when the American book industry’s major convention still had a fairly clear purpose — for booksellers to meet publishers — and was run by the American Booksellers Association, before it sold the rights to Reed Exhibitions, and he offers a concise history explaining how it got to from that to its current confused state: “Reed set out to expand that aspect of things and to make the show bigger and better. But their timing was terribly unfortunate. The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the internet age. Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable … Things had evolved to the point where publishers were paying good money for booth space to be sitting targets for consultants and new tech propositions to put forth their propositions. How long, I wondered, would publishers pay good money to make prospecting for work efficient for me and others like me?”

Meanwhile, an Associated Press wire story says that while “This weekend’s BookExpo America will be a good time for … worrying,” it makes it seem the problem is not the fault of the BEA itself, but rather the impact of the economic crisis: “The show will likely cover 20 percent to 25 percent less space than last year and cocktails, rather than dinners, will be the standard for after-hours gatherings.”

Show director Lane Fensterman puts an even more positive spin on it than that: Reed is getting rid of the riff-raff, he explained in a recent report on Publishers Lunch. “The show is right-sizing,” he says. “The show has been probably too large and some of the presence from the publishers too much…. This a process that probably should have happened and needs to happen. The economy is a catalyst to make this happen faster.”

Hmmm, and here we at Melville House thought we’d opted out because we couldn’t afford it.

Secret novel on sale now!

The Christian Science Monitor reports that when Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore was released, “fans complained that their response to it was dulled by too much advance press coverage.”

Murakami’s publisher heard their cry. Murakami’s new novel, set to be released today, has been kept completely under wraps. The only thing known about it is the title “1Q84″ and the author.

And the secrecy is working like a dream. Takashi Machii, spokesman for Shinchosha, the book’s publisher, told the Associated Press, “It is amazing. People are craving his latest novel.” And Shinchosha “raised its first printing to 480,000 copies from 380,000 after orders flooded in,” according to the AP.

The book sells for 3,600 yen ($38), and is already starting to appear in some stores, prior to the national launch. “The secrecy surrounding the work is making customers absolutely famished for this book,” said Toshiaki Uchida, assistant manager at Yaesu Book Center, told the AP.

Speculation is that the book’s title is “a reference to George Orwell’s 1984, because the number nine in Japanese is pronounced like the English letter Q. Others speculate, however, that the title is an homage to the novella The True Story of Ah Q by Chinese novelist Lu Xun,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The AP tells us that the novel is “a complex and surreal narrative” that “shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other” and includes exploration of “social and emotional issues such as cult religion, violence, family ties and love.”

It is not know when or if an English language translation will be published. Though chances are good, we’ll all hear about it way in advance. I don’t think US publishers will care to keep it under their hat….

SharedBook, a “custom publishing enabler,”  has launched a website devoted to the Google Book Settlement debate.

From yesterday’s press release at sharedbook.com:

“For the first time, the full settlement, amicus briefs, and other relevant documents will be gathered on a single platform, http://gbs.sharedbook.com, which will allow all stakeholders to interactively share their diverse points of view through a contextual, online discussion of this industry-changing settlement agreement.”

SharedBook is simultaneously touting their proprietary software, which allows visitor’s to annotate the collected documents:

“SharedBook’s annotation platform allows comments and responsive statements to be posted in real-time, linking them directly to the Google Book Settlement and accompanying documents through online footnoting, while (unlike a wiki) always preserving the original documents in their original form. Access to the platform can be controlled according to a variety of criteria or opened to the public, as in this case. As a result, the Google Book Settlement site will be an informed and transparent analysis of key points of the settlement by its most concerned stakeholders, made available to anyone on the Web.”

“Is there a crisis in art book publishing?” asks Jamie Camplin in this report for The Art Newspaper. “Most people who love art — collectors, gallery-goers, curators, critics, dealers and artists themselves — understandably take it for granted that there is an audience for books about it.” But is there?

Camplin notes that art book publishing faces challenges that are “real and substantial, but they are only obliquely connected with the economic downturn that is currently creating problems for the commercial art world, as well as for museums and other cultural institutions.” Among them: reaching its audience when art journalism is disappearing, and the “preoccupation with low prices” that has been fostered especially by Amazon.com. She says it’s had “the pernicious effect of devaluing books in the minds of consumers, with especially problematic consequences for art-book publishers, whose costs — of design, production and copyright — cannot be fully reflected in retail prices.”

Nonetheless, she expresses some optimim: “Art-book publishing is not for dreamers, but there remains a vast potential as an incentive for triumphing over the challenges … If today’s audiences have largely lost the Classical and Christian culture of their forebears, that does not destroy the great western art of the past; it just makes it fresh terrain for the publisher. If eyes have been opened to the whole world via global travel and the movements of peoples, a whole new range of canvases is now revealed to us. If we moan about ‘dumbing down’ in the face of the visual noise that comes our way daily, it only means that we are living in the age of ‘more’ — more that is mediocre, but also more that is astonishingly creative.”

Nedim Gursel

Bookninja points us to this article by Sebnem Arsu, on the New York Times Arts Beat blog: “A Turkish author on trial after being charged with inciting religious hatred in a novel based on the birth of Islam said that his book was a work of fiction but the result of extensive research and consultation with religious leaders, and therefore could not be called blasphemous.” Seems author Nedim Gursel faces up to a year in jail if convicted of having committed blashphemy in his novel Daughters of Allah. After it came out last yar, “a citizen complained that Mr. Gursel had used inappropriate language against the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and the Koran,” says the Times.

But Gursel is not giving up easily. He’s written a public letter to Turksih Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which he notes “the damage such trials could cause Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union. Similar trials against intellectuals like the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk have caused local and international protests, forcing lawmakers to redefine statutes addressing freedom of expression. But despite changes intended to pave the way to E.U. membership, intellectuals and writers remain vulnerable to laws that are often criticized as having vague and subjective language.”

Jane Austen, in a disputed portrait supposedly made when she was 14

Andrew Norman says he’s discovered the identity of the mystery man who broke Jane Austen’s heart. As Matthew Moore reports
in this story for The Telegraph, Austen never married but “the emotional warmth of her romantic novels has always fed speculation about her private passions” — such as who was the real-life inspiration for the dashing Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

Austen scholars know she was forlorn over a case of unrequited love. In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, she wrote, “There seems no likelihood of his coming into Hampshire
this Christmas, and it is therefore most probably that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.” Her writings also reveal that later, she had a bitter falling-out with Cassandra over this mystery man.

Now, Norman, author of Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love, says Austen’s true love was a local clergyman named Dr. Samuel Blackall, as evidenced by, among other things. “Dr Blackall’s letters to friends disclose his wish to pursue a courtship with the young author, but his uncertainty was treated as a snub by Austen,” according to Norman.

“Austen’s novels and poems from around this time support the Blackall theory,” according to Norman, and add an even sadder revelation: “that the author and her sister Cassandra were driven apart as they battled for his affections.” As evidence, Norman cites one of Austen’s poems, entitled “Miss Austen,” seemingly directed at her sister: “It is the cause of many woes/ It swells the eyes and reds the nose/ And very often changes those/ Who once were friends to bitter foes.”

“Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce and culture by which we have absorbed, stored and transmitted information, opinion, art and wisdom,” observes acclaimed FSG editor Elisabeth Sifton. “No wonder, then, that the book business, although a very small part of the American economy, has attracted disproportionate attention. But does it still merit this attention? Do books still have their power?”

In a thoughtful essay for The Nation, Sifton writes, “Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.”

So what does it all mean? “It is a confused, confusing and very fluid situation, and no one can predict how books and readers will survive,” says Sifton. “Changed reading habits have already transformed and diminished them both. I, for one, don’t trust the book trade to see us through this. Wariness is in order”

Turning the page in the Eucalyptus reader

How to make book into a hit: Get some lunkhead to ban it. Of course, in this instance the book — the Kama Sutra — was already pretty much a hit. But then, as this as this MacWorld report details, Apple went and banned its ebook app for the iPhone and the ancient text got to be a hit all over again in a whole new format never dreamed of by it author — that would be Nandi the Sacred Bull, of course — never dreamed of.

And now that Apple has unbanned the app in question — the Eucalyptus reader — “serious readers can rejoice,” says Ben Boychuk in this MacWorld report. “Eucalyptus is really, really good. It looks and feels the way  Amazon’s Kindle app should but does not.”

So what’s so good about it? “Eucalyptus by Things Made Out of Other Things is a client for Project Gutenberg’s library of nearly 30,000 titles ….  The experience is as close to that of a real book as the iPhone will allow. You flip pages rather than scroll vertically or horizontally. The pages resemble paper. After awhile, you almost forget you are reading on a screen.”

“There are numerous ways for the appearance of a book’s page to turn off a potential reader,” says book designer Maggie Dana in an essay on the How Publishing Really Works blog. She doesn’t really get into how this works, and underplays the quality of the content by quite a lot, but still makes an interesting point about the connection between the impact of what’s written and how it’s designed: “A book’s design (I’m talking interior page design here, not covers) has one major purpose and that is to make the words on the page end up in the reader’s mind as effortlessly and as seamlessly as possible. Doesn’t matter if the book is a novel, a textbook, a dictionary, or even a car repair manual, the principle is the same. If the reader is motivated to absorb the information but finds himself unable to do so, the design is not doing its job.”