Google's supposedly diabolical ambition to digitize the word's literature pissed off France first, predictably. I'm not dissing France—I never got into the "freedom fries" nonsense—but that is one proud nation when it comes to its cultural heritage. All right, so the complaints of French literati reach the ears of Jacques Chirac himself, and now at least five other countries are getting huffy about it, too. (Some reports indicate a coalition of 19 nations.) The fear is that national literary heritage will somehow be sidelines, or overshadowed, or minimized, or some other vague horror, by the fact of an American company getting its digital hands on it.

This foolishness is so wrong, and betrays a profound misunderstanding of Google and its intentions. Google probably could not care a whit about national cultural legacies; the company is simply attempting to broaden its advertising network. Nearly 100 percent of Google's revenues derive from advertising, and the nearly entire thrust of Google's R&D is focused on creating more pages upon which to display contextual ads. More pages; more ads; more clickthroughs; more revenue. That is the whole formula, notwithstanding the presumptions of chauvinism foisted upon Google by influential French intellectuals.

There's another potential problem here that could backfire against the European coalition. As the music industry is starting to learn, when the available content catalog is fractured, marketplace adoption is slowed. If France and its friends wish their literary traditions to hold proud places in the world's catalog of books, allying with Google is probably the best bet at this stage, even if they also create their own digitization projects. If French literature is walled off in its own secret garden when everyone starts using Google Print, how does that enhance is France's pride or presence in the global scene?