No, here in Italy there isn't ( significative ) book about Vg history.

But I strongly reccomend to read Sam Pettus's articles about Sega history. Biased toward Sega maybe but with alot of sources. Simply amazing:

http://www.goodcowfilms.com/farm/games/www.eidolons-inn.net/segabase/index.html

EDIT: new link

Articles written before 2001-2002 ( eh eh Yamauchi stepped down in 2001/2002 so both Namco and Square started to develop for Nintendo systems ).

^^Wow, great read! So that's why Namco virtually ignored the N64.
I guess Namco and Nintendo are finally becoming friends again, now that they make/made games with Nintendo licenses, and have big Wii-blockbusters in production such as Fragile and Tales.

It's possible but not very recommended. IMO healthy competition drives the industry to a higher standard.

Hopefully not, otherwise we'd also see graphics return to a sub-ps1 era, too.

Not to mention that every game would be boring.

Nintendo ha no choice but fight that war as they got their butts handed to them in 1992 and 1993 due to snes being viewed as a slower childrens console by the teen population who were the main videogame buyers at the time. No blood in Mortal Kombat and inferior sports games didn't help either...

I agree that market growth is good for everyone but industry growth can backfire as well. Look at 3do, philips CDI and all multimedia systems that came out in early 90's. They were trying to expand the market and failed due to genesis and Snes domination.

Squaresoft didn't choose Sony because of the CD. The truth is that the relationship between Square and Nintendo were bad at the time.
Square was angry that Nintendo favoured Enix with the bigger cartridge and after the ( relative ) success of FF6 even in USA want to have privileges.
The relantion was so consumed that with Super Mario RPG the pact was that Square would have published the title in Japan ( the biggest market potential for JRPG ) while Nintendo would have published it in USA.
Nintendo broke the pact and published it in both markets ( 1.5 million in Jap, 0.5 in USA ).
Then Square released the last 2 titles in development on Snes in Japan and jumped at the Sony ship starting to made negative comment about Ultra64 (N64).
Yamauchi was so furious that bannished Square from every Nintendo systems until 2002 when he stepped down.

Personally I think that the problems that Nintendo had with Snes was due to the fact that they launched it later because with Nes profits they funded the Nintendo Empire known to this days ( Nes most profitable year was 1991 ).

What is clear is that already at that time 3rd parties started to escape from Nintendo. The Snes also was a console caught in between a technological leap ( CD media, polygon ). It has the potential to sell 10 mllion more than Snes but ended selling 10 less. 

PS: The abortion of systems you cited never really expanded the market. They tried to jump to the multimedia bandwagon but that was onl a fad ( a true fad not  the Wii )

PPS: Obviously I think that in USA Kalinske did an awesome work at Sega. So not only Nintendo fault.

dp

Essentially, the problem Nintendo has was Sony, in some way, flipped the industry. They made 3rd party games big as it gave a larger reach of products and didn't require to make games for themselves. This put Nintendo on a steep slope. While the N64 was still liked by many gamers, the Gamecube fell as a result of Yamauchi. Iwata had to basically rebuild Nintendo.