The European Commission today set out more detail on the future of its digital library project Europeana and the Commissioner has stated how she welcomes the evolution of new business models . It's exciting as the project aims to bring even more books, paintings and pictures online. Sure, some people have suggested this means there's some sort of competition between Europeana and our own projects on books. I guess it makes a nice headline, but it's just not true. The fact is that bringing our cultural heritage online is a tremendous undertaking that can only be achieved by both private and public effort. Both services are complimentary. Indeed, Google is working hard to expand its cooperation with European libraries which form Europeana's backbone. Google has already forged partnerships to scan public domain works with 30 libraries all around the world, including the Oxford University, the Bavarian State Library, the University of Lausanne and the University of Ghent. Google Books contains works in more than 100 languages. Just this week, the Italian Ministry of Culture announced that it would like to work with us to accelerate scanning of Italian-language works. I recently visited one of our library partners, the Ghent library. I was amazed by the progress there. In just two years, almost 100,000 of the university's of public domain books have been scanned, making them available to anyone anywhere in the world. An Australian or African studying 17th-century Flemish art history now has access to a treasure trove of Dutch-language books, without needing to travel all the way to Belgium or to attend the University of Ghent. This revolutionary spread of knowledge represents the inspiration of projects such as Europeana and Google Books. Of course, a key challenge for such projects is how to revive access to books that are in copyright, but are out of print. Until now, it is very difficult for projects like Europeana or Google Books to enable readers to access these books, even though they represent the bulk of library collections. In Ghent, for example, we only scan work published before the mid 19th-century. By contrast, Google last year reached a groundbreaking agreement with an international class of authors and publishers that aims to bring back to life millions of these out of print in copyright books. If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate the rights holders of these in copyright but difficult to find books and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers. The Commission is holding an information hearing on this agreement in Brussels on September 7. We welcome this as an opportunity to talk about the agreement and on how to develop solutions contributing to spread knowledge and culture through projects like Google Books and Europeana. Here, too, the European Commission Communication released today is helpful, as it launches a public consultation about how to allow for the developments of services similar to the one proposed under the US Google Book agreement. Google is interested in pursuing all avenues of strengthening and expanding our partnership with this ambitious digitization effort. Posted by Antoine Aubert, European Copyright Policy Manager
WOW! I did not realize people were writing enough digital books to already fill a library. Hope they all registered copyrights??
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