Sarkozy To Throw Another Billion At Digitizing Books

from the and-he-could-have-let-Google-do-it-for-free... dept

Thu, Dec 17th 2009 4:40pm — Mike Masnick

As a few folks sent in, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to spend approximately $1.1 billion scanning books. Does this sound familiar? It should. Five years ago, French officials freaked out about Google scanning all those books, and declared they were going to spend $2.5 billion on its own project, called Quaero. And what happened? Well, it turned into a huge boondoggle with a bunch of companies claiming the money, but nothing of substance ever coming from the project, which has now been mostly abandoned.

So, now we've got Sarkozy -- defender and mass infringer of copyrights -- who recently warned that Google's book scanning project was somehow a threat to French culture. So, now he's going to spend $1.1 billion more on a project that we hope will be at least marginally more well defined than Quaero. In the meantime, France's national library is apparently all set to have Google scan its collection of books. Seems easier. In fact, the report notes that the $1.1 billion will go to private companies to scan books, and it's entirely possible that Google could be one of those companies. After all, it's pretty good at book scanning.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: books, france, nicolas sarkozy, scanning

9 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

1$ for you, 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:06pm

Will they get 1$ fromhim
OH wait labels said has to be ten bucks
wonder if sarkozy can afford that
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:35pm

Book scanning? Don't you mean book stealing?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Alan Gerow (profile), 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:45pm

Re:
I hope you're just really bad at sarcasm delivery.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:54pm

Re: Re:
I am bad at sarcasm delivery!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 11:55pm

Sarkozy won't let anybody threaten French culture, rather he would do it himself.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
., 18 Dec 2009 @ 2:16am

Sarkozy
Sarkozy is to France what Bush Jr. was to the U.S. :)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Michael, 18 Dec 2009 @ 4:47am

Wow
This guy gives the FRENCH a bad name.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 18 Dec 2009 @ 4:58am

Wow Sarcozy figured out an ingenious way of throwing money away, I though Gorden Brown was good with his ID card scheme but he's got nothing on this guy.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Johnny Canada, 18 Dec 2009 @ 8:31am

French Court Finds Google Books Guilty of Copyright Violation
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/breaking-french-find-google-guilty-copyright-vio lation-google-books?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed% 3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+International
[ link to this | view in thread ]