Monday, February 21, 2005

Google Book Index to make Anglo-Saxon Dominant ?

An interesting posting at the community EU blog Viewropa entitled Quand Google défie l'Europe (When Google defies Europe) discusses an issue of interest raised by Google's indexing of 15 million books (4.5 billion pages) from the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, worries that this will contribute to a crushing domination of Anglo-Saxon literature on the web and he proposes that Europe counter with its own digital libraries and search engines.

Our comment is: and where has Europe been the last 20 years? When one views EU politics and economics on the interenational scene, we can often not escape the feeling that many Europeans, especially those in positions of authority, have learned nothing in the past decades, and that is why America dominates the digital world.