Google Books Close to a Deal with French National Library

Google Books is about to score another victory, this time in France. It looks like when the search giant sets its sights on something nothing will stand in its way, be it publishers, competitors and even national pride. After four years of resistance the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) is very close to signing a deal with Google, allowing the Mountain View company to scan the library's gigantic catalogue of works and add them to its Google Books project.

A number of French publications carried the news yesterday, including La Tribune, and the story was picked up by The Times Online. In a wave of national pride, and perhaps political propaganda, the library was very opposed to Google's intentions of digitizing its works for free. In 2005, rallied by the then President Jacques Chirac, the library sought help from the European Union in setting up a virtual library called Europeana, which eventually went online last year though with less than the hoped-for success.

Things appear to have changed and, in the end, financial wisdom won out over national pride. The French government only set aside €5 million a year for the digitization process yet the library estimates that it would need €80 million just for the books from 1870 to 1940. The library has works as far back as from 1368 and has amassed around 13.2 million bibliographic records so far. Google would scan the works for free and add them to the online repository.

The BNF now joins 29 other important libraries that opened up their catalogue to Google. So far Google Books houses around 10 million works, a large part of them out of copyright or “orphaned” works for which the original copyright holder can't be found. The Google Books project is still facing an uphill battle as a settlement with publishers and authors will be reviewed in court in the coming months. The settlement is also under scrutiny from the US Department of Justice.