Google Books Signs First French Library

Google announced that it had signed its 29th library partner for Google Book Search and the project's first partner in France: the Lyon Municipal Library, France's second largest library after the national library in Paris. It will make more than 500,000 books available online as part of Google's Book Search project. Under the plan, Google and Lyon will digitize and offer access to out-of-copyright works, to be searchable through Google Book Search.

The partnership suggests a thaw in Franco-Google relations and comes just a year after Google's most impassioned international critic, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, left his post as head of the French national library. In 2005, Jeanneney expressed alarm over Google's original plan to digitize books from five prominent university libraries, saying that the plan would favor Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language. In 2006, his book Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge argued that Google's book scanning plan constituted “a risk of crushing domination by America.”