By
Paul Biba
So says the Bookseller today. That’s the Bibliotheque—the French national library—in the picture.
French Prime Minister François Fillon has endorsed the idea that Google might digitise some books and documents of the French National Library. Closing a government seminar on the digital economy last week, he said that "Google is not a problem, but a challenge". Fillon dismissed the recent uproar over reports that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was in negotiations with Google. "It would be shocking if it (the BNF) were not doing so," he declared. …
During a roundtable chaired by Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, Google France chief Mats Carduner said he had offered to transmit to the BNF and the European digital library Europeana all the out-of-copyright French language books digitised by Google in the United States.
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September 14th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
When you consider that we have books reaching back thousands of years, Google’s zeal to grab those written recently enough to still be in copyright looks a bit suspicious. We could easily spend the next ten years doing a decent job of scanning and organizing pre-1922 books, more than enough time to sort out the issues of in-copyright orphan texts in ways that are fair to everyone.