French Consortium Is Out to Battle Google Over Book Scanning

Efforts to digitize French culture, from Marcel Proust’s manuscripts to the first films of the legendary Lumière brothers, have been bogged down by the country’s reluctance to rely on help from Google.

But France thinks it may now have an alternative.

A consortium of French technology companies and government-backed I.T. research labs says it can provide the skills needed by European libraries, universities, publishers and others to scan, catalog and deliver to end-users the contents of their archives better than Google can.

Full story in the NYT