Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, René Ricol, Commissioner General for Investment, Bruno Racine, President of the National Library of France, Antoine Gallimard, President of the Syndicat national de l'Edition and Jean-Claude Bologne, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres, signed a framework agreement reflecting the desire to give new life, in digital form, to books under the rights of the 20th century that are no longer sold in bookshops. A corpus of 500,000 books will thus be digitized and offered for sale within five years.
The result of a year of reflection and consultation, this framework agreement allows a new phase in the implementation of this project with the completion of a detailed feasibility study in the coming months. It recalls in particular that books digitized through Investments for the Future will be exploited in the framework of a collective management ensuring that publishers and authors, represented on an equal footing, receive equitable remuneration with strict respect for moral and economic rights. The intellectual property code will be amended accordingly.
Books will be digitized from legal deposit collections held at the Library
France. The latter may keep a digital copy for its own use. The Gallica website
(http://gallica.bnf.fr/) will present all the enriched bibliographic references, with the possibility of
and will refer to merchant sites for the acquisition of digital books.
The State’s financial support will be part of the «development of the digital economy» programme.
This €4.5 billion programme is one of the main components of the €35 billion that the government is mobilizing for «future investments». It includes a 750 million euro component
develop new forms of exploitation and digitization of cultural, scientific and
educational.