Hachette Livre and Google sign a partnership agreement on digital books

Thanks to constructive discussions, Google and Hachette Livre today announce the final signature of the partnership agreement. This agreement, which is based on the memorandum of understanding signed last November between Google and Hachette Livre, which organizes the digitization of thousands of French language books controlled by Hachette Livre and which are no longer commercially available (which is the case of the vast majority of all books ever published).

This agreement aims to breathe new life to thousands of dormant out-of-print works, for the benefit of authors but also academics, researchers and general public. As announced a few months ago, Hachette Livre will get the following benefits from this cooperation :

• Control over the scanning of its books. Hachette will determine which works it wants Google to scan, and among those, which should be made available (or not) as ebooks via Google ebooks or used for other commercial applications such as print on demand (POD).
• New business opportunities. This agreement will give users access to currently unavailable works while providing new revenues to their authors and publishers. Hachette Livre will obtain copies of the scans in order to offer works in print on demand (POD).
• Enhanced visibility of its authors and their works in public digital libraries. Hachette Livre intends to make digital copies of scanned works available to the database of public institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, thus contributing to the advancement of French culture.

This partnership is the result of constructive discussions between Hachette Livre and Google. Google hopes to conclude similar agreements with other French publishers, to give a new digital life to many valuable French works that are currently unavailable.