Jean-Noël Jeanneney is the president of the French Bibliothèque nationale. I am rather a fan of French intellectuals, though perhaps only in the way that the French are fans of Jerry Lewis; that is, I enjoy their work as a kind of slapstick that confirms my existing prejudices. So for these reasons at least, Jeanneney's short polemic against Google should be right up my street.
In Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, Jeanneney argues that Google's plan to put all the classics of literature online will be more selective and less universal than its creators believe – chiefly because of an inevitable Anglo-Saxon bias. This turns out to be a double bias, one that not only favours the English language but also commercialism. I can hardly complain that I didn't come here to be insulted: I stuck with the book to the end. But I didn't expect to receive two such strikes, condemned not only as an English-speaker but a rather grubby one.
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