Most books published in Norway before 2001 are going online for free thanks to an initiative that may have found the formula to reconcile authors with the Web.
At a time when the publishing world is torn over its relationship to the Internet — which has massively expanded access to books, but also threatens royalty revenues — the National Library of Norway is digitizing tens of thousands of titles, from masterworks by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun to the first detective novels by Nordic noir king Jo Nesboe.
The copyright-protected books are available free online — with the consent of the copyright holders — at the Web site bokhylla.no (bokhylla means “bookshelf” in Norwegian).
Photo: AFP
The site currently features 135,000 works and will eventually reach 250,000, including Norwegian translations of foreign books.
Norwegian National Library head 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.
“Many national libraries digitize their collections for conservation reasons or even to grant access to them, but those are [older] books that are already in the public domain,” she said. “We thought that, since we had to digitize 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.”
The library has signed an agreement with Kopinor, an umbrella group representing major authors and publishers through 22 member organizations.
For every digitized page that goes online, the library pays a predetermined sum to Kopinor, which will be responsible for distributing the royalties among its members under a system that is still being worked out.
The per-page amount decreases gradually as the collection expands — from 0.36 kroner (US$0.06) last year to 0.33 kroner next year.
“A bestseller is treated on an equal footing with a regional almanac from the 1930s,” Kopinor head Yngve Slettholm said.
Some measures have been implemented to protect the authors: Bokhylla does not feature works published after 2000, access is limited to Internet users in Norway and foreign researchers and the books cannot be downloaded.
An author or publishing house that objects can also request the removal of a book, but relatively few have done so.
Only 3,500 books have been removed from the list and most of them are not bestselling novels, but rather school and children’s books — two very profitable genres for publishers.
Among all the works eligible to appear on Bokhylla by household names Stephen King, Ken Follett, John Steinbeck, Jo Nesboe and Kari Fossum, only a few are missing.
So far, sales 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, Skarstein said.
“Books are increasingly becoming perishable goods,” she said. “When the novelty effect fades out, they sink into oblivion.”
Eighty-five percent of all books available on the site have been accessed by users at some point, proving that digitizing does not only benefit major works.
While many countries’ attempts at digital libraries have gotten stuck in complex copyright discussions, Norway has been successful partly due to the limited number of stakeholders — the library and Kopinor — and the near-universal coverage of their agreement, which even includes authors who are not Kopinor members.
“In other countries, you need an agreement among all the copyright holders,” Slettholm said. “But it’s hard to find all of them: old authors that nobody knows, publishing houses that closed in the 1960s, every illustrator, every photographer.”
“Instead of spending our money on trying to find the copyright holders, we prefer to give it to them,” Skarstein said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including