Daily book biz round-up: Penguin and Amazon make up; Garrison Keillor gets piled on; and more

More news from around the Web:

• The New York Times takes stock of BookExpo America
• Penguin and Amazon finally reconcile their differences. Aww!
• Chinese author sues Google for scanning her book. Good luck with that one…
• Conditions at iPad factory (aka, “The House of Suicidally Unhappy Workers”) just keep getting worse
• Marvel Comics finds “tremendous success” with iPad app
• Publishing industry tells Garrison Keillor to cram it

Daily book biz round-up, March 19

One last news round-up before the weekend:

• Amazon plays hardball with Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Hachette
• Amazon unveils Kindle for Mac. (Meanwhile, cats and dogs form truce, start working together to overthrow humans.)
• Is new Kindle app a victory for Amazon or Apple?
• Apple might not have much content ready for iPad launch
• Ian Rankin finds literary circuit to be full of “bitching and backbiting“
• Shane Koyczan reflects on his Olympics experience
• If you’re going to write about Parisian fabrics, get a lawyer first
• Joe Sacco becomes first graphic novelist to win Ridenhour Prize for “truth-telling”
• Bloomsbury group archive sheds new light on Virginia Woolf’s death
• Wanna see the future of book scanning? Check this out

Google Book Search announces new features

While the publishing industry frets about Google’s looming supremacy over the written word, Google itself just continues on its merry way, scanning books and fine-tuning the presentation of them. Yesterday, Google announced a number of tweaks to its Book Search product, which include improved word search functionality, improved page-turn functionality, and newer, faster ways of jumping back and forth in the text.

You can read about all the changes here.

Etiquette advice for Google Book Search

Dan Blacharski, a columnist for ITworld.com, has weighed in on the Microsoft vs. Google book search debate, pointing out that while it is fashionable to bash Microsoft as a corporate bully, the Microsoft Live Book Search system treats copyright holders more fairly than Google Book Search does, because Microsoft only “displays books that are past their copyright, or have been specifically authorized by the copyright holder.”

The big question is that do I, as a creator of content and writer of books, have a problem with my books being on Google Book Search? It’s a tough question. When a library carries one of my books, they have purchased it from the publisher, and I get my fifty cents worth of royalty payment. But a library makes that book available only to a local community; if an online library makes a book available in digital form to the entire world, there should be adequate compensation to the author. But as I said, that’s not what Google is doing. They are, however, providing a summary, table of contents, title page, index, and copyright page, a link to buy the book, and a place to search the book. Search results will show snippets of text, maybe a few paragraphs, related to the search. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like such an egregious imposition on my rights, and it may help me sell a few books in the process. The grey area comes in deciding whether Google has a right to scan and index those books without permission from the publisher. Publishers may well decide it’s to their advantage to grant permission-but it would be more fair for Google to seek out that permission before scanning.

A Google feature in TIME magazine last year reported that the company’s founders use the informal corporate motto “don’t be evil.” Perhaps they also should add a corollary from everybody’s mom: “And always ask politely before you borrow something.”