These days, publishers don’t need a search engine to know which way the wind blows. This week’s settlement of US book publishers’ long-running dispute with Google over the search group’s plans to make millions of copyrighted books available for browsing online was just the latest sign that purveyors of dead trees and ink are coming to terms with the internet’s rise as the dominant medium of the age. After all, the same day the deal was announced, The Christian Science Monitor newspaper said it would abandon its daily print edition in favour of a weekly paper and daily online version, adding credence to the notion that in today’s media environment, the shift from print to pixels is all but inevitable.

If approved by a US judge, the Google deal would clear the way for the search engine to digitise books and make snippets of their contents available to web surfers, paying authors and publishers when readers buy online access to the works.