PARIS (IHT) -- Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, asked last November as his company unveiled the Kindle, a portable, electronic book-reading device. 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.

A year later, that bastion is starting to yield. The world of books is going digital, too.
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 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.
""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 settlement remains subject to approval by a U.S. court, and the bookshop would operate only in the United States for now. 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.
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. Letters from Mozart to his friends, from the Austrian National Library in Vienna? They're there. Early printings of his work, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France? They are, too.
Meanwhile, publishers are moving ahead with a flurry of digital initiatives, tapping the Internet for the marketing, distribution and even the creation of books. In some cases they are racing against Internet startups that have similar ideas.
""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. ""The book publishing business has had a front-row seat to see what happened to the music industry.""
So far, book publishing has been spared that fate. As the music business was decimated by digital piracy over the last decade, book sales continued to rise, aided, in fact, by the ability to browse and buy from online emporiums like Amazon.
But there are some worrying signs. Book sales in the United States, for example, fell 1.5 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Among the few bright spots in the publishers' figures were sales of so-called e-books, the kind that are read on devices like the Kindle, on personal computers or on mobile phones. U.S. wholesale sales of e-books were up 55 percent from a year earlier, with growth accelerating to 78 percent in September.
Questions remain over the best way to deliver digital books to readers. In the United States, the recent surge in sales followed the introduction of the Kindle and upgrades in rival devices like the Sony Reader, which allow users to download books wirelessly or from an Internet-connected computer.
But in Europe, where such devices are only slowly becoming available, sales of e-books remain in their infancy. The price of these gadgets - the Kindle, for example, costs $359 in the United States - may put off readers, analysts say.
In Japan, another hand-held device, the mobile phone, has so far proved to be the most popular way to read e-books, according to the Digital Content Association of Japan. Sales of digital versions of manga comic books are leading the way. Penguin said it also had high hopes for selling e-books to mobile phone users in places like India.
About half a million people in more than 50 countries have downloaded Stanza, an application that lets them read e-books on the iPhone, said Michael Smith, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum in Toronto. ""The adoption is happening,"" he said. ""It's not theory. It's happening.""
A survey published in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair last month showed that 40 percent of book publishing professionals thought digital sales, regardless of the format, would surpass the ink-on-paper kind by 2018.
That would be a big leap. Revenue from e-books and other digital sources remain tiny - less than 1 percent of the worldwide sales of Penguin Group, for example, according to Genevieve Shore, digital director for Penguin in London.
But the Google deal with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild could be a catalyst, analysts say. Under the proposed settlement, Google would share revenue from online sales with publishers and authors.
""We're very excited about it,"" Shore said. ""What it means is that a very important player in our online lives, we're not in conflict with anymore.""
Publishers are also looking at other new ways to sell books in digital form. Shore said Penguin was considering subscription plans, under which readers would pay a monthly fee for online access to best sellers. Another possibility, she said, would be to offer free or reduced-price online versions of books, supported by advertising - an approach adopted by most newspapers on the Internet.
""We will have some interesting new business models on the market in 2009,"" she said.
Free electronic versions of some books have been available for years. Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to archive books, has more than 25,000 works available for download. Feedbooks, a start-up company in Paris, is formatting many of these books for use on mobile devices.
But there are limits to what readers can find on Feedbooks. The Orwell book ""1984,"" for example, is available; the latest best sellers are not. That is because Project Gutenberg archives mostly books that are in the public domain, meaning their copyrights have expired.
The Google settlement with U.S. rights holders largely concerned another kind of works, those that are still under copyright but no longer in print. Many analysts say this is where digitization could make the biggest difference, allowing publishers to offer readers vast numbers of additional books - the so-called long tail of the Internet.
In Europe, Google has refrained from including such works in Book Search. But it has signed up seven prominent European libraries, including the Bodleian at Oxford University and the municipal library of Lyon, to its book-scanning project.
""This illustrates how important European content is for us,"" said Santiago de la Mora, head of European partnerships for Google Book Search. ""We want to offer content that is relevant to our users in every country.""
Efforts to build online libraries or bookstores remain more complicated in Europe than in the United States. In showing portions of copyrighted U.S. works in Book Search, Google had argued that it was protected by the ""fair-use"" provision of U.S. copyright law, which permits limited copying. In a position paper this summer, the European Commission argued that no similar defense should be permitted for commercial Internet activities in Europe.
The commission does want to make it easier to clear copyrights for ""long tail"" works, which can be a cumbersome task in Europe. Commission-sponsored talks among European copyright groups, publishers and others is set to begin next week.
Even as online business models are still evolving, publishers are using the Internet to promote books in more imaginative ways.
Publishers like Penguin and HarperCollins have set up online social networks aimed at specific groups of readers, like travelers or teenagers, to let them share opinions about books. Penguin this summer joined Match.com, a creator of online dating services, to set up a site dedicated to helping book lovers hook up.
""What the technology brings is the ability to connect with other readers,"" said Shore, the Penguin digital director. ""It's important that books are seen as a medium that's worth talking about.' iht