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France to start its own digitisation project – takes slap at Google
December 9, 2009 | 8:39 am
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By Paul Biba
Without mentioning Google by name, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took a direct slap at them by saying: ” We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is”. He then went on to say: “We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.”
Sarkozy said that France would start its own digitisation project to be financed by a national loan. More info here and here.
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Comments:
This is rather strange, and I confess I don’t understand exactly what M. Sarkozy is contemplating. Does he mean to ‘lend’ the money to the French national libraries, and the libraries would then be forced to make money off the digitized books in order to pay back the national loan?
Doesn’t France support her libraries anymore? Why not just set aside monies for those libraries to digitize their books? A few scanning stations could be set up in one library, scan all the books in the collection, and then the stations would be trucked to the next library in line.
Perhaps President Obama could create some new jobs by setting aside money to scan all the texts in the Library of Congress, and make them available online for free.
Haha. Sucks to be French.