Might Ryu Murakami's switch to the iPad signal the beginning of the end for traditional publishers?

The battle for the ownership of the book is still being fought on several fronts. It's a confusing scene, hard to interpret. Depending on where you look, through the fog of IT innovation, there are either white flags or fluttering standards of resistance.

Earlier this month, in a manoeuvre I predict will soon be seen as a watershed, the admired contemporary Japanese writer Ryu Murakami announced that he was publishing his new book, A Singing Whale, in partnership with Apple, as an iPad download, turning his back on his regular Japanese publisher, Kodansha. The book will also include video content set to music composed by Oscar-winning Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Murakami's radical rewriting of a business plan that dates to the Enlightenment has been on the cards for a while. Until now, however, it has been confined to the fringes, and seen as overspeculative. Last year, a US business book writer, Stephen Covey, caused a frisson when he bypassed his publisher to make a direct deal with Amazon. In April, Stephen King, who has flirted with the web for years, released the e-book of his latest, Blockade Billy, ahead of hardcover publication.

Murakami's move is something else, however, a highly significant defection to the enemy. Although not as well known as his celebrated namesake Haruki, the author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Ryu Murakami is an important literary figure in Japan, a serious writer with a serious career and readership. If he is tearing up the contract by which publishers worldwide do business and reaches a bigger, better audience through the iPad, what next? What copycat stampede might not his example inspire among other writers?

Ever since the 1990s the world of books has adopted various attitudes towards a changing marketplace that can be summarised as basically: there but for the grace of God go I. With a very few exceptions, everyone – publishers, authors, agents, editors, and booksellers – has prayed that they won't be forced to accommodate to the biggest paradigm shift in 500 years.

It's clear that the new technology, especially the e-book, is so cheap, adaptable and contagious that anyone – even that classic mug, the author – can become a player. Even an agent like Andrew Wylie, who once told me that he had tried a Kindle for less than 90 minutes before tossing it aside, is now moving into e-book publishing, aggressively declaring war on the traditional publishers with his Odyssey Editions, and making a direct alliance with Amazon. Simultaneously, in their own fields, Apple and Google – the market leaders – are fiercely competing to change the marketplace. Last week for instance, Google announced $1m worth of grants to support academic research into digitised literature. This, it must be said, is probably where advocates of the traditional book will take comfort.

Thanks to Google it will now be possible to see and compare any version of a famous opening line from a classic such as Virgil's Aeneid, analyse every citation and examine every instance of quotation. Impressive? Possibly. Pointless? Probably. This, by the way, is by no means the craziest project sponsored by the pirates of Palo Alto. The same announcement also trumpeted a research project that would "better characterise Victorian society" by quantifying the vocabulary of "every book written during the era".

Somewhere between the inanities sponsored by Google and the wisdom of Murakami there's some stodgy middle ground where the steady application of scholarly logic to the culture of the book in the age of digitisation is yielding dividends.

Consider, for instance, the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This fabulous collection holds some of the manuscript treasures of English literature, one of the first versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a very early edition of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. For several years, Cambridge and Stanford universities have been collaborating to digitise these texts for the benefit of all. Now, scholars across the world can access these treasures at the click of a mouse, inspecting them more thoroughly than if they were in the Parker Library.

End of story? Well, no. I hear that one unintended consequence of this unique scholarly programme might be to intensify academic interest in the manuscripts themselves. Apparently, the electronic (and almost free) version is not enough. Mr Murakami, take note.

Kafka's lost words and last words

It's the new genre

As the silly season approaches, I'm glad to report that there's a new genre creeping on to airport bookstalls. It's Frog-rom, a heady cocktail of the classic Anglo‑French travel book (à la Peter Mayle) and soft‑centred chick lit (Adele Parks etc). The market leaders are Karen Wheeler's Toute Allure: Falling in Love in Rural France, and effortlessly posh Michael Wright's Je t'aime à la folie, subtitled "One man's quest to fulfil a lifelong dream" (aka Wright's quest for love in darkest France). Strangely, it seems there's no equivalent literature from the other side of the Channel.