A four-year fight to keep the contents of the country’s national library in French hands ended in defeat as it was announced that Google would take control of the archive. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was reported to be on the verge of a deal with Google under which Google’s digital library would get even larger.
The decision was purely financial, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the library — which will be joining 29 other leading libraries in opening its shelves to Google’s project, including Oxford’s Bodleian. France provided only €5 million a year for digitising books for Gallica, the national digital library, yet the national library needed up to €80 million (£68 million) just for its works from 1870 to 1940, he said.
Google scans items for free and has so far added about ten million works to its Books Search database, the great majority of them out-of-copyright works. Non-copyright books can be read for free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
The library had led the fight against what France saw as American imperialism ever since President Chirac issued a battle cry over the affair in early 2005. Paris mustered support for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
Source: Times Online
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