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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS