Trop de livres Anglo

Fearing cultural irrelevance, the leader of France bought into his chief librarian's concerns that a generous academic effort by Google to digitize libraries constitutes a threat to Europe's place in the pantheon of learned nations. According to Reuters, Jacques Chirac told chief librarian Jean-Noel Jeanneney to draw up a plan for a competitive effort, a month after the librarian voiced fears that world societies could end up awash in ideas that he believed were inherently tied to the Anglo-Saxon racial group.

Google's effort to scan vast amounts of works in some of the world's greatest libraries, is to create a searchable database of millions of texts. Google said it will make access to the material free and likely use advertising to pay for it.