Norway to digitize all Norwegian books

In most other countries, if those books were still under copyright, the digitized versions (assuming publishers even allowed them to be made in the first place) would probably only be available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a small screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made. But in Norway, the government is planning on digitizing ALL of Norway’s books by 2020.

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s. Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library’s holdings. By law, “all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway,” so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people’s language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years.