France Digitizing Books

The French government has announced plans to digitize, and make available to the public, thousands of out-of-print books. They're compiling a list of about 500,000 books published before 2001 that are no longer available. These books will be sold online, with 50% of the royalties designated for the authors. The plan is to make this an opt-out program, i.e., authors who don’t want to participate will have to notify the administrators within 6 months. There are a lot of similarities between this and the proposed Google Books Settlement from last year. You'll find all the details on the proposal at paidcontent.org.