Mountain View, California — Another new beginning for Google Books. After what appeared like ages of little or no news about its digitization program, a new headway has begun. Internet search engine behemoth on Tuesday inked a €30m (£24m) deal with Austria’s National Library to digitize 400,000 copyright-free books, a vast collection spanning 400 years of European history.
The Austrian National Library will allow Google to digitize all its public domain books, etcetera from the 16th to the 19th century, unfolding one of the world’s most important historical book collections available online.
A post on the European Public Policy Blog explained, “The library was founded in the fourteenth century, and it was intended to become the universal human library, containing books in German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among other languages. It contains the first ever printed book in Slovene, the oldest known prints in Bulgarian and an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian works.”
Furthermore, the Austrian National Library has a small number of papers authored by Gregor Mendel, who is acknowledged as the father of modern genetics, along with Martin Luther’s “first complete translation of the Christian bible.” So there really appears to be something for everyone.
According to AFP, Google will support the digitization costs — around €50-100 per book — but will not have exclusive use of the works, which will also be available on the library’s website and that of Europeana.
Johanna Rachinger, the head of the library, commended what she called an “important step,” arguing at a news conference that “there are hardly few projects of such a caliber elsewhere in Europe.”
The Austrian library project involves one of the world’s five biggest collections of 16th-19th century literature, totaling some 120m pages, the ONB claims. Altogether, around 400,000 works in total will be digitized over the coming years.
Under the terms of agreement, digitizing work is to commence in 2011 in Bavaria in southern Germany, and is expected to last around six years. Furthermore, the library will cover the cost to prepare the books for scanning, store the book data, and provide public access to it.
Rachinger said the library expects the process will help preserve its original works, as well as presenting digital back-up copies in case of any calamity. Also, Google will not be permitted to exclusive use of the scanned books, which will be accessible on the ONB’s website www.onb.ac.at, the Google Books library at books.google.fr and its European counterpart www.europeana.eu, Rachinger added.
The US search engine leader has been scanning millions of books to create a digital library and electronic bookstore but the project has been marred by controversy because of copyright, anti-trust and privacy issues.
Google has so far digitized some 12 million books, collected from more than 40 libraries worldwide including those of Stanford and Harvard universities, with a similar deal inked in March with Rome and Florence universities in Italy. However, the move could further annoy those countries that have complained about Google’s unilateral move to its digitizing policy.
Nevertheless, opponents have challenged its book-scanning activities in court, with US lawsuits filed by authors and publishers and more recently by photographers, and similar action under way in France. The US judge who has been presiding over the Google Settlement, now senator Denny Chin, has yet to make his final ruling.
Now we just have to enjoy the waiting game again, granting Google a chance to scan everything the library chooses to offer.