All Norwegian books to be digitized in Norway

In the US, when Google began its plan to digitize a huge number of books with its massive scanning program, authors in the US filed suit and mired the program in legal proceedings for a long time. While book digitizing in the US in uncertain at this point, the country of Norway is set to digitize all the native language books there are, all of them.

The National Library of Norway has announced that it will digitize all native Norwegian language books by the mid 2020 range. That means that hundreds of thousands of books will be made available in digital format. Every book in the library will eventually be digitized.

The catch is that to access the books, users will have to be using an IP address from Norway. That means no foreign readers can get their mitts on the digital content. Norway plans to digitally scan books even if they are still under copyright.

Books that aren't covered by copyright, from all time periods, will be offered as digital downloads. I wonder if anything on this scale will ever happen in the US and other countries where copyright prevents the digitizing of large amounts of written content.

SOURCE: TechDirt