German Government to Establish Google Book Competitor

Germany’s not pleased the Google plans to take its book digitization efforts to Europe. Publishing Perspectives reports that it’s going to try and fend off Google with its own library:

In fact, Germany now has a plan to challenge Google at its own game. In December, the government announced the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) — the German Digital Library — a plan to connect the databases of 30,000 German cultural and academic organizations and create an Internet portal that would be available to all German citizens.

This new digital library will contain everything from books and documents, to paintings, film and music recordings. In addition, it will be linked to Europeana, a similar project launched in 2008 by the European Union (that still contains little content and remains difficult to access), and to libreka!, the German e-book portal run by the MVB, a subsidiary of the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (the German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

Though the German government will work on the basis of an opt-in policy (as opposed to Google’s much-derided opt-out policy, which assumes that publishers want their books digitized), not everyone sees the government-run counterpart as a panacea:

Despite this clearly defined plan, not everyone is convinced that it will avoid all of the pitfalls of the original Google Settlement. Several major German publications, including Spiegel Online, the FAZ and the Tagesspiegel, object to the fact that the project is not due to launch until 2011, and argue that it poses some of the same problems as Google Books. Most notably, as long as German law continues to protect the copyright of “orphan works” (books without a clear copyright holder) for 70 years after the death of the author, the DDB will not be able to provide access to a good number of relatively recent works that are no longer available for purchase.

What has also becoming increasingly clear since the announcement was made is that many German publishers do not necessarily want a distinct alternative to Google Books, but simply to have their own agreement with Google.

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