Apologies for any cross-posting.
Geoff West
Hispanic Collections
The British Library
London
-----Original Message-----
From: Latin Americanist Librarians' Announcements List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gayle Williams
Sent: 19 October 2005 14:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fwd: NYT--google print in europe
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 18:40:44 EDT
From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: NYTimes.com: Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe,
Widening Its Book Search Effort
Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort By
EDWARD WYATT
FRANKFURT, Oct. 17 - Google said Monday that it had begun operating
local-language sites in eight European countries for its Google Print
program, its closely watched effort to make all of the world's books
searchable online, expanding into territories where it has drawn fierce
criticism.
The Google Print sites - for France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands,
Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain - enable users to search books
provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books
in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights.
Susan Wojcicki, a vice president for product management at Google, said
in an interview Monday that the new sites currently could be used to
search only a relatively small number of books. Many of those have been
scanned since August, when the company, seeking to expand its online
book program, began approaching European publishers.
Google is planning to discuss the new sites this week at the Frankfurt
Book Fair, one of the largest annual gatherings of publishers, agents
and authors. A Google executive is also scheduled to take part in a
three-hour panel discussion on Friday about the numerous competing
efforts to digitize books.
That discussion is also to include Jean-Nel Jeanneney, the president of
the French National Library, who began advocating for a European effort
to digitize and catalog the Continent's library collections soon after
Google announced agreements with five major libraries last December to
digitize their collections of 15 million books and documents.
The European sites work much the same as the main Google Print site
(print.google.com). A user searching the German site, print.google.de,
for a word will receive links to books containing that word. The user
can see some of the pages in each book where the word appears, review
the book's bibliographic information and link to retailers that will
sell the book directly to the user.
Eventually, the European sites will give users access to data about
foreign-language books in the collections of the New York Public Library
and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford.
Among the European publishers that have signed pacts with Google are
Grupo Planeta and Grupo Anaya of Spain, De Boeck and Editions De L'Eclat
of France and Springer Science & Business Media of Holland.
copyright 2005 the New York Times
####
----- End forwarded message -----
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