Google

Amazon continued to cash in on our new shop-work-relax-from-home habits in the first three months of this year, reporting a huge rise in sales and a tripling of profits.

Almost every aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic has served to boost the tech giant's revenues, from video streaming to grocery delivery.

It said it expects the boom to continue over the next few months.  Read more

I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically constricted to the point of being, essentially, broken.

What a difference the passage of six years makes, Mike Shatzkin reminded us, introducing the Digital Book World conference in New York yesterday (Tuesday 8th March).  Read more

Today, federal judge Denny Chin rejected a copyright challenge Google's practices of scanning books into digital format and presenting snippets of those scans in search results because the practices qualify as fair use. It's an exciting and hard-fought victory for Google, one that took nearly a decade of litigation and many millions of dollars to achieve.  Read more

An article which covers some of the fascinating material in Robert McCrum's five-part BBC Radio 4 series about five great publishers.