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.

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Filed Under: books, france, nicolas sarkozy, scanning

9 Comments

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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
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:35pm

Book scanning? Don't you mean book stealing?
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- Alan Gerow (profile), 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:45pm
  
  Re:
  I hope you're just really bad at sarcasm delivery.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 5:54pm
    
    Re: Re:
    I am bad at sarcasm delivery!
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Dec 2009 @ 11:55pm

Sarkozy won't let anybody threaten French culture, rather he would do it himself.
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., 18 Dec 2009 @ 2:16am

Sarkozy
Sarkozy is to France what Bush Jr. was to the U.S. :)
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Michael, 18 Dec 2009 @ 4:47am

Wow
This guy gives the FRENCH a bad name.
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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.
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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
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