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The Authors Guild and Google made revisions to the Google Books Settlement in Federal Court late Friday.

Google Inc. and book publishers are expected to submit to a federal judge in New York today a new settlement in the 2005 copyright lawsuit over Google's book-scanning project, according to an Associated Press (AP) report. The deadline had been Monday, but U.S. District Judge Denny Chin extended it to give the involved parties more time to respond to questions related to the creation of a digital books library.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin has extended yesterday's deadline for Google, publishers and authors to revise a proposed settlement over the company’s plans to make millions of book available online.

An appeal by photographers to be included in the Google Book Settlement was denied yesterday by Judge Denny Chin

An effort by photographers to be included as part of the Google Book Settlement was denied yesterday by Judge Denny Chin

As an author of Internet-marketing books and the former Web editor for Chelsea Green Publishing, Jesse S. McDougall knows a bit about using the Internet—and specifically, social media marketing—to sell books.

It's well-known that reference books generally have been suffering lately, another facet of the industry that has been affected by the Internet and consumers' easy access to free information. "For 2009, revenue-wise, … we estimated reference book sales would fall much [more] than that of the other categories we expected to do poorly this year …," says Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, a market research and consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. "The simple reason is that consumers have a different relationship with reference-book content than they do with, say, a great work of fiction or an engaging biography. They mostly just need a snippet of information here and there, and being that the Web houses a lot of what a consumer thinks he or she needs, few are bothering to buy traditional reference books."

In a classic, 19th-century short story, Washington Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle wakes up after being asleep for 20 years to find that the world has changed all around him. People he loved, including his wife, are no longer alive, and the country itself has—in the intervening two decades—gone through the massive trauma and upheaval of the Civil War. For Rip Van Winkle, it seems like only a few peaceful hours have passed; all he did was close his eyes. But in what seemed to him a short amount of time, everything around him had irrevocably changed.

"The market for digital books … has been roughly doubling every 18 months,” says Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media’s vice president of digital initiatives. “Follow that line out, and in less than a decade it’s 64 times the size it is now.”

Department Encourages the Parties to Continue Their Ongoing Discussions to Address Class Action, Copyright and Antitrust Concerns in the Proposed Settlement