World libraries: The National Library of Norway to digitize all the books and allow free reading of them

The National Library of Norway digitizes all books, which are in its collection. These are not only scans of pages, but full electronic books, in which the text can be found. All of them will be free available in the Internet. 

Great Britain and Finland are familiar such initiatives, but in Norway they did not stop – they have signed contracts with the owners that allow all users who are in the country, to read this material free.

The library has the equipment to scan and recognize text in books. It is also able to add metadata and put digitized works in the online database. Librarians believe that the digitization of materials, the oldest of which date back to the Middle Ages, will take 20 to 30 years. The library began to do this in 2006.