We rejected the Goggle model not because it is not a good model but because it did not correspond to any of our practices. It did not correspond to our legislation and to our agreements with our authors. It would have squandered our cultural assets. Were we to find our books a bit everywhere for nothing, how would we be able to market them under other formats, on another platform, while at the same time paying the authors what they are due? We know that libraries have digitized books massively, even here in Canada, and that they have adopted practices that are not beneficial to publishers, but that is because they do not have enough money. For everything that is presently free of copyright—the whole national Canadian heritage that is not copyrighted—we should absolutely grant massive subsidies to our libraries to help them digitize it. If we want that to be available somewhere, it will be easy to set up agreements with the libraries so that it be present on our own platform, which would not be difficult to organize and would be fantastic. It would mean that all the books not protected by copyright could be found there.
Of course, everything that is copyrighted belongs to the publishers. We would rather that funds be used to support the publishers for everything that is copyrighted. That way, the publishing industry would be able to create quality works which... Every time there is a copy of a copyrighted book, the publisher would be able to grant the copyright free of charge to a library under the exemption rules already present in the legislation.
I must tell you that our platform is already linked to other French-language platforms all over the world, such as Numilog or Materiels.fr, and that the people who maintain it, that is to say our Association and the technology company, work with online bookstores. We negotiate contracts and agreements, we set up business models, and we work with the people who design e-readers such as the iPad. We would also like them to design audio readers for our visually disabled persons but, at this time, those exist only in English. That is one thing that Canada could do for its cultural minorities.