Books go online for free in Norway

By Martin Chilton, Culture Editor online

National Library of Norway puts more than 135,000 copyright-protected books online for free – and pays authors and publishers

More than 135,000 books still in copyright are going online for free in Norway after an innovative scheme by the National Library ensured that publishers and authors are paid for the project.

The copyright-protected books (including translations of foreign books) have to be published before 2000 and the digitising has to be done with the consent of the copyright holders.

National Library of Norway chief Vigdis Moe Skarstein said the project is the first of its kind to offer free online access to books still under copyright, which in Norway expires 70 years after the author's death. Books by Stephen King, Ken Follett, John Steinbeck, Jo Nesbø, Karin Fossum and Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun are among those in the scheme.

The National Library has signed an agreement with Kopinor, an umbrella group representing major authors and publishers through 22 member organisations, and for every digitised page that goes online, the library pays a predetermined sum to Kopinor, which will be responsible for distributing the royalties among its members. The per-page amount was 0.36 Norwegian kroner (four pence), which will decrease to three pence when the online collection reaches its estimated target of 250,000 books

The books are available in Norway at the site bokhylla.no ("bookshelf" in Norwegian) but access is limited to internet users in Norway (and foreign researchers) and the books cannot be downloaded. Some authors or publishing firms have objected but only 3,500 books have been removed from the list and most of these have been school textbooks.

The good news is that so far sales in bookshops do not appear to have been affected by the project. Instead, Bokhylla often gives a second life to works that are still under copyright but sold out at bookshops, said Moe Skarstein. "Books are increasingly becoming perishable goods," she told AFP reporter Pierre-Henry Deshayes, "when the novelty effect fades out, they sink into oblivion. Many national libraries digitise their collections for conservation reasons or even to grant access to them, but those are (older) books that are already in the public domain. We thought that, since we had to digitise all our collection in order to preserve it for the next 1,000 years, it was also important to broaden access to it as much as possible."

Yngve Slettholm, head of Kopinor, said: "A bestseller is treated on an equal footing with a regional almanac from the Thirties. Instead of spending our money on trying to find the copyright holders, we prefer to give it to them."

More than 115,000 books from the Norwegian collection have already been read online. Attempts at free digital libraries in other European countries have often stalled over complex copyright discussions 

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