In the English-speaking world, Jeanneney is probably best known to historians of contemporary France as a distinguished colleague. In the French context, he is a prominent and widely respected public figure. Before taking up his current position as president of France’s national library, he was president and general manager of Radio France. He has also exercised significant political responsibility – regionally, nationally and at the European level.

The argument of the book is composed, lucid and compelling. It is also quite different from the numerous critiques and court cases mounted against Google in the United States, by authors and publishers essentially concerned with issues of copyright. The tone of the internal American debate was nicely summed up in a Washington Post editorial (22 October 2005) opposing Mary Sue Colman, president of the University of Michigan (one of Google’s stable of participating libraries), and a non-fiction writer, Nick Taylor, president of the Authors’ Guild. Colman argued for writers to be generous in the interest of the public good; Taylor pleaded for recognition of writers’ dignity and for fair compensation. For his part, Jeanneney, in acknowledging and even admiring the boldness of the Google plan, does of course underline the incompatibilities between Google’s proposals and European conventions on authors’ rights (which are much more rigorous than those pertaining in the United States). However, he gives greater emphasis to other factors. He points out the opaqueness of the Google selection process and the cultural bias involved in dealing only with Anglophone libraries and with a massively English language corpus. He draws attention to the indifferent quality of the technical presentation of the texts, which he reads as indicating poor understanding of the inherent value of the book as a cultural object. He spends some time discussing the failure of Google’s methodology to take account of the acquired wisdom of the great libraries of the world in organising their collections: Google appears not to be capable of contextualising selections in a culturally meaningful way. Finally, he notes the inherent danger of entrusting such archival treasures to a commercial entity whose future is by definition aleatory, subject to take over or financial collapse. Readers of the English version of Jeanneney’s work, efficiently translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, have the benefit of material not available in the original French publication (a revised French edition appeared in late 2006). There is an informative foreword by Ian E. Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, which provides both important historical context and a number of principles for future action. Jeanneney himself also offers a detailed account of how his book came to be, and of its subsequent impact. It is, in fact, a quite remarkable story. When Google announced, in December 2004, its intention to digitise fifteen million books in the public domain, Jeanneney responded in Le Monde (23 January 2005) with an essay that turned out to provide the framework of the book published in April 2005. In the meantime, in March, no doubt fired by Jeanneney’s warning of what he called in Le Monde ‘the risk of a crushing American dominance in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world’, French President Jacques Chirac called an urgent meeting with Jeanneney and his minister for culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres. This meeting gave Jeanneney’s initiative the political support it needed, and set in train the development of a major project: the creation of a European digital library, based on the commitment and collaboration of European libraries and governments under the auspices of the European Union. By the end of 2006, this project had gained strong support at all levels, and indeed appeared to be fulfilling Jeanneney’s dream of a major common European cultural enterprise. He saw this as a possible way of recreating some momentum and enthusiasm in the European unification process that had been so dramatically halted by the failure of the European Constitution project, particularly in France.

As vice-president of the European digital library steering committee, Jeanneney has been influential at all phases of its evolution. Driven by his Europeanist’s commitment to cultural diversity, while sharing the traditional European Union distrust of unfettered market forces, he advocates explicit and substantial governmental-level involvement in the project, as well as collaborations with industry partners. This is partly because of the scale of resources required, but also because he believes that a key responsibility of government is to protect and enhance the interests of citizens, and that a strong government presence is the best way of keeping the market honest. This multilateral and collaborative approach contrasts strongly with the unilateral, monocultural and commercial Google concept.

Jeanneney’s work – both his book and his contributions to the European digital library project – also needs to be considered in a wider context. His spat with Google is part of the bigger and longer term conflict between Europe and the United States over the management of information technology which, from the European perspective, is inextricably linked to the question of safeguarding cultural diversity. If President Chirac acted as promptly as he did to Jeanneney’s ‘wake-up call’ in Le Monde, it was because these matters had already been considered for some time as having critical strategic importance. Many readers may be surprised (and could rightly be concerned) by the extent to which the potential to control the Internet rests in the United States, particularly through the ownership by the Department of Commerce of the Domain Name System (DNS) and of the root servers. In the tension opposing American determination to maintain control, and a Europe-led attempt to create a more multilateral constitution for internet governance, Jeanneney’s contribution is significant. Further evidence of the scale of the conflict can be seen in the United States’s refusal to endorse the UNESCO 2005 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which was vigorously promoted by the European Union. (The United States and Israel were the only ‘No’ voters; Australia decisively abstained.)

Jeanneney is confident in the ongoing vitality of printed books, libraries and librarians, and bookshops. His thoroughgoing embrace of the new technologies (and he demonstrates impressive mastery of the technical dimensions of the information revolution) comes from his conviction that they have the capacity to enrich and extend human achievement, rather than diminishing it.

What he sees as the distinctive European contribution to the digitising of the world’s books is high-quality content that respects the integrity of all participating cultures, including their languages. It is a vision that seeks to be informed by the best possible principles of organisation and access, one that calls for active cooperation with the emerging future superpowers of China and India, and explicitly expresses solidarity with cultures that – in Africa and the Arab world, for instance – are presently endangered through economic disadvantage. The realisation of this vision, as Jeanneney readily admits, faces formidable obstacles. However, achievements to date are encouraging, and certainly sufficient to suggest that, if the political will is strong enough, the challenges can be met.