Don't confuse this one with the government-sponsored program that made news on Monday.
France's efforts to digitize its culture, from Marcel Proust's manuscripts to the first films of the legendary Lumiere brothers, long have been bogged down by the country's reluctance to rely on help from American internet giant Google.
A new startup launched Thursday says it may be the answer.
The consortium of French technology companies and government-backed IT research labs says it can provide the know-how needed by Europe's libraries, universities, publishers and others to scan, catalog and deliver to end users the contents of their archives — better than Google can.
The consortium's partners have studied the results of Google Books' scanning efforts, "and we know that we can do better," said Alain Pierrot, one of the project's leaders.
"We also know we have a ways to go, in productivity, in quality, in profitability. And we set up the consortium to do exactly that," Pierrot said at a news conference to present the project.
The all-French challenger calls itself "an alternative to Google," despite a yawning gulf between them in terms of size.
The French project goes by the name "Polinum," a French acronym that stands for "Operating Platform for Digital Books."
It is led by Jean-Pierre Gerault, the chief executive of a French company that makes optical scanning machines used to rapidly and automatically scan thousands of book pages an hour. He said it has attracted 4 million euros ($5.7)
[Snip]
The consortium is made up of eight members, including i2S. Other members are Exalead, a French search engine, Isako, a software and electronic publishing company, and Labri, a Bordeaux-based information technology research laboratory.
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