The European Union launched the EU Bookshop Digital Library at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair. Twelve million scanned pages in more than 110, 000 EU publications are now available free of charge for download in the EU Bookshop Digital Library. The digital library offers all publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952.
The Publications Office Digital Library was a response to a growing demand to digitise out-of-print publications. In 2007, the Publications Office launched a PDF-on-demand service, wherein users could request publications to be retrieved from the archives and scanned as needed. The demand was so high that within six months the service was saturated. To better serve the users, it was decided to scan the industrial volumes of the entire archive.
The result – less than two years later – is an electronic library of more than 14 million pages of web-optimised PDFs available to the public free of charge. It consists of the 12 million scanned pages of historic publications and about 2 million pages of recent publications. At the rate of 1600 new publications per year, EU Bookshop is projected as a valuable information source for citizens, journalists, education professionals, students, librarians, publishers, and anybody interested in Europe, in about 50 languages, including the possibility of ordering printed copies.
EU Bookshop content will also be accessible via Europeana, a digitisation project of many prominent national European libraries and archives.
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