"The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step toward a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing." "Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliotheque nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google's Library Project: its potential to misrepresent - and even damage - the world's cultural heritage. In this work, Jeanneney argues that Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad."--BOOK JACKET.
