Michael Blackburn’s Posterous

Google’s plans to provide digital versions of classic books over the internet have run into trouble in France after President Sarkozy vowed to spend hundreds of millions of euros to see off what he regards as a threat to the country’s cultural heritage.

Mr Sarkozy has signalled that he will earmark a substantial portion of a new state investment fund to try to head off Google’s drive to digitise French-language and European books and art.

“We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” Mr Sarkozy said.

“We are not going to be deprived of what generations and generations have produced in the French language just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.”

Related Links

• COMMENT
  Is the pen mightier than the Google gorilla?

Publishing is the latest creative industry to face a digital revolution with Google building a huge library of scanned books and cultural artefacts.

The giant Californian internet company unveiled plans recently to scan out-of-copyright books and make them digitally searchable online. Mr Sarkozy’s remarks, in a public meeting in Alsace, herald a new battle in France’s long resistance against American and English-language inroads in its economy and culture.

In 2006 Jacques Chirac, the last President, mounted a grand Franco-German project for a European search engine to beat Google but the taxfunded project, called Quaero (Latin for “I search”), has fizzled out. Past strategic projects, such as Airbus and the Ariane satellite launcher, have triumphed. Galileo, the Frenchinspired European rival to the American GPS satellite system, is soon to come on line.

Mr Sarkozy’s money will go to boosting Gallica, France’s own book-scanning project, which is tied into Europeana, the EU’s ambitious digital library.

The underfunded institution, also inspired by France and backed by Germany, has gathered pace over the past year. Defenders of Gallic independence warned of disaster if France allowed Google to digitise its culture.

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, a former chief of the national library (BNF), said that Europe’s very history was under threat. The French could be fed only an Anglo-Saxon version of its revolution in which “valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man”, he wrote recently.

Mr Jeanneney and his fellow digital patriots were apoplectic last August when the BNF turned collaborator and brought in Google Books to scan part of its collection.

Frederic Mitterrand, the recently appointed Culture Minister, has embarked on a crusade to lock France’s libraries, museum collections, films and television archives into the state-owned digital programme.

This will cost more than £700 million, he says. Mr Mitterrand is now working to “achieve a European consensus against Google”, although he accepted in principle the possibility that Google could become a junior partner in the French programme. He met senior Google executives and told them that the French state would be firmly in charge. “We have to regulate the market. The state has to do it and not some private concern,” he said.

Google has scanned more than 100,000 French works still protected by copyright. Seuil, one of France’s biggest publishers, has sued Google in a French court for copyright breach.

Others see Mr Sarkozy’s campaign as another uncommercial scheme to promote French grandeur. Francis Balle, a Sorbonne University professor, urged the Government to co-operate with Google: “It is still possible for us to avoid digging in out of fear behind a new Maginot line.”

While I admire the French for their willingness to protect their own culture (something our own politicians and intellectuals should learn from), this strikes me as a bit of ridiculous political posturing. If you want to promote your country's culture, surely you would want its literature to be more available to the world at large?

The idea of a government (and that includes the EU) trying to take on Google in the construction of such a project is laughable - it's bound to be a costly failure.

The following words are from Christian Bök, responding during a Q&A session  at Kelly Writers House, UPenn, November 18, 2009:

“I think that my poetics makes it viable for me to excuse a whole variety of obsessive compulsive disorders. It’s not Asperger syndrome; it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Half the battle of being a poet is trying to transform what would otherwise be dismissed as a weakness into a strength, trying to find ways in which something that should fail under other circumstances finds an ecology within which it can succeed. I think that the more mechanistic and regimented aspects of my work constitute a kind of intellectual crutch used to evaluate the merits of the work upon its completion — at the very least I know when it’s done — and I can see the outcome of the experiment and be relatively satisfied that it fulfills the constraints of this procedural program, this set of algorithms that I’ve established in advance. I’ve put the constraints in place in part to conduct a kind of scientific experiment; I want to be surprised in a relatively rigorous way by the work that I do. I think it’s almost impossible to surprise yourself because of course you’re supposed to know everything about yourself in advance. But by adopting a series of otherwise programmatic constraints, you create a hypothetical set of controlled conditions under which an experiment can be quite literally conducted and the outcome has the potential to be surprising. In effect, it has the potential to produce information.”

“The more delicate components of the work pay attention to craft. I’m probably technically oriented and it seems to me that among the poets that I know, many are very lazy and very dumb. I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they thought it was, poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know. They became poets in part because they were demoted to that job, right? You should never tell your students to write what they know because, of course, they know nothing: they’re poets! If they knew something, they’d be in that disciple actually doing it: they’d be in history or physics or math or business or whatever it is where they could excel. I find this very distressing that the challenge of being a poet in effect to showcase something wondrous or uncanny, if not sublime, about the use of language itself, that we tend to think that because we’re conditioned to use language every day as part of a social contract, we should all be incipient poets, when in fact people have actually dedicated years or decades of their lives to this kind of practice in order to become adept at it and I think that craft and technique are part of that. If poetry weren’t informed by models of craft then nobody would need take a creative writing course. I joke with my students again that if it was simply a matter of saying, “You known you’ve written a good poem just because; you’ll know it was a good poem when it happens.” To me, that’s tantamount to telling your students that “You should just use the force, Luke” in order to write a poem. I don’t think it’s very helpful. But to be able to say “Here’s a series of rules of thumb that always work under all circumstances and if you adopt them slavishly, blindly, you can always be assured of writing something, producing something of merit.” I think it’s important that students are at least reassured that there are some technical aptitudes that they can adopt.

So I think that there’s two competing coincident strains to the work: on the one hand, I rely on this kind of regimentation so that I can evaluate the merits of my own work after the fact and I probably rely on a lot of technical rigor just so that I can feel what I do is actually justifiable, that it actually constitutes something of athletic or virtuoso merit.”

To celebrate our 200th issue Ambit invites you to enter our 200 WORDS COMPETITION!
Judged by Ambit writers Naomi Foyle and David Gaffney.

Send us poems or prose of 200 words* for a chance to win!

1st prize: £500
2nd prize: £200
3rd prize: £75

What sort of writing does Ambit like? Buy a copy to find out. Better yet, subscribe!

Entries cost £4 for the first one, and £3 for subsequent entries.

(*no shorter than 196, no longer that 204. This includes the title!)

Closing date is 15 February 2010.

Good luck!

Download the competition form

 

 

Worth having a go - and worth supporting Ambit, one of the UK's great literary mag survivors.