Sarkozy To Throw Another Billion At Digitizing Books
from the and-he-could-have-let-Google-do-it-for-free... dept
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 $1.1 billion will go to private companies to scan books, and it’s entirely possible that Google could be one of those companies. After all, it’s pretty good at book scanning.
Filed Under: books, france, nicolas sarkozy, scanning
Comments on “Sarkozy To Throw Another Billion At Digitizing Books”
Will they get 1$ fromhim
OH wait labels said has to be ten bucks
wonder if sarkozy can afford that
Book scanning? Don’t you mean book stealing?
Re: Re:
I hope you’re just really bad at sarcasm delivery.
Re: Re: Re:
I am bad at sarcasm delivery!
Sarkozy won’t let anybody threaten French culture, rather he would do it himself.
Sarkozy
Sarkozy is to France what Bush Jr. was to the U.S. 🙂
Wow
This guy gives the FRENCH a bad name.
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.
French Court Finds Google Books Guilty of Copyright Violation
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/breaking-french-find-google-guilty-copyright-violation-google-books?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+International