You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
The final agreement for Google to scan out-of-print French language books for Hachette Livre, to be signed by mid-May, will be for a period of five years, the publishing group’s legal director Vianney de la Boulaye said.
He told the French monthly communications law review Légipresse that the pact was complementary to the Grey Zone (Zone Grise) project to scan unavailable 20th century works that is being steered by the culture ministry among French publishers, booksellers and authors and will be financed from public funds.
"The notion of unavailable works specified in the MOU is the same as in the Zone Grise project, according to the same criteria", he said. Urging other French publishers to sign similar agreements with Google, he said this would help resolve funding difficulties for the industry-wide project because "scanned files could be transmitted to the BNF (French National Library) or at least indexed by Gallica", the BNF’s digital library. A simplified French-language version of the MOU, that was signed last November 16th, will shortly be made available to other publishers.
Although the Zone Grise project has been scaled back to 200,000 works, it would fill a gap left by the accord with Google, as it will involve a rights collection agency that should be in place in 2012 or 2013, de la Boulaye added.
The question of revenue sharing between Hachette Livre and Google "is left to future agreements", but will be on the basis of agency contracts. Confirming that Hachette will not be able to market scanned titles without authorising Google to do the same, he said that in "a market as new as ebooks, there is place for numerous players". Anything that helps build ebook catalogues "is beneficial for publishers and authors".