Austria's national library, Osterreichischen Nationalbibliothek (ONB), has announced a 30-million-euro deal with Internet search services provider Google Inc. to digitise 400,000 copyright-free books, a vast collection spanning 400 years of European history.
According to ONB, the Austrian library project concerns one of the world's five biggest collections of 16th- to 19th-century literature, totaling about 120 million pages. Under the deal, Google will cover the costs of digitising the collection - set at around 50 to 100 euros per book. The ONB will pay to prepare the books for scanning, store the book data, and provide public access to it.
Scanning work will begin in 2011 in Bavaria in southern Germany, and is expected to last around six years. The library hopes that the process will help preserve its original works, as well as provide digital back-up copies in case of a disaster. According to Johanna Rachinger, head of the ONB library, Google will not have exclusive use of the scanned books, which will be accessible on the ONB's website at www.onb.ac.at, the Google Books library at books.google.fr and its European counterpart www.europeana.eu.
Google has been scanning millions of books to create a digital library and electronic bookstore. The project has been dogged by controversy because of anti-trust, copyright and privacy issues. Google has until now digitised about 12 million books, drawn from over 40 libraries. This includes those of Stanford and Harvard universities, with a similar deal struck in March with Rome and Florence universities in Italy.
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