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    Norway is digitizing all its books and making them free to read online

    Norway is digitizing all its books and making them free to read online

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    norway library
    norway library

    The National Library of Norway is digitizing all the books in its collection, processing the text to make it searchable, and making them available to read online.

    It's similar to the mass digitization efforts in the UK and Finland, but Norway has taken the extra step of making agreements with many publishers to allow anyone with a Norway IP address to access copyrighted material.

    The library owns equipment for scanning and text structure analysis of the books. It's also adding metadata and storing the files in a database for easy retrieval.

    Librarians estimate the digitization of the entire collection, which includes materials dating back to the Middle Ages, will take 20 to 30 years. The effort started in 2006.