European Commission Project Challenges Google Books - PCWorld

"Europeana is the E.U.'s digital library and currently offers free access to more than 15 million digitized books, maps, newspapers, paintings, photographs and other artifacts. This puts it in competition with Google Books, which also estimates that it has digitized 15 million books. The main area of concern for Europeana is in so-called "orphan works" material whose potential right-holders are unknown or books that are out of print. Monday's report recommended that although it is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitize out-of-print works and exploit them, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitize material and make it available to the public, for which right-holders should be remunerated...."I am not sure that Google Books are doing exactly the same thing as us. We want to give the widest access to the widest audience on a free basis. Europeana is not based on a business model of profitability. This being said we believe that there are opportunities for new players to confront Google," said Maurice Lévy, one of the authors of the report...."