Slovenian National Library

As the Slovenian National Library provides no clues as to the printed sources (aside from a bland "From the collections of Variteté A.D."), nor the translator nor the copyright, I found those details instead on the original publication of Valéry's letters with another digital version , put up onto the web by a Massachusetts based organization, "The History Guide", which aims at giving students and teachers good content to "revolutionizing education in the spirit of socratic wisdom" and issuing, as it goes, its own 'creative commons' kind of conditions of usage with its site. In fact, this is not the only online ressource for Valéry's seminal pamphlet. The Université du Québec à Chicoutimi is so proud of its digital (French) version of "La crise de l'esprit" that it not only places it in a nice layout, but even adds the name and Email address of the person who did the digital version so nicely, Pierre Palpant. Thank you very much for your help indeed! In return, "La crise de l'esprit" cannot be retrieved from Europeana, or its source, "Gallica", the pride of "La Bibliothèque nationale de France", BnF, for copyright reasons. As for Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kröger", I can find it full text at Scribd, a generally 'legal' portal, yet with lots of copyrighted, not so kosher reading stuff uploaded by and for students as well, and - my favorite finding by far - anpther copy at the most popular Italian dating site, "Amore Infinito", in a bi-lingual version as a translation exercise and promo sample for its translator Heinrich F. Fleck who even claims a copyright for his translation, and refers to "casa Fisher" (recte Frankfurt based Holtzbrinck daughter S. Fischer) for the original rights. At Google books, I find most texts by Mann and Valéry with only their bibliographical data, yet no quotes, but an English collection of Valéry's "Writings", including some of his poems in French, in a still available edition of "New Directions", the famous house of Ezra Pound, William Carlos William, or more recently, Robert Walser and Roberto Bolano. "Tonio Kröger", of course, is also available as an e-Book for legal download, for instance at Mobipocket at Euro 1,20. It is all a big mess indeed. This by far non-exhaustive research of only a few titles of two writers, a French and a German modern classic, neither one a bestseller for their rights holder, Holtzbrinck's S. Fischer for Thomas Mann, and Gallimard for Paul Valéry, are good enough though to provide a glimpse on the many mirrors reflecting books and related copyrighted material (or, even more so, so called orphaned works with no obvious rights holder to ask for permissions) onto the web. For good reasons, I excluded any notorious piracy sites in this research. As a reader, I have serious doubts that at this stage, a good solution for me can evolve out of a legal battle between author or publisher organizations, and the likes of Google. And yet, of course, I want rights to be respected, and writers and others who are adding value to be paid. It certainly must not be rewarded that one actor, in this case Google, decided to move first forcefully, and than, reluctantly, may comply to questions asked later. And I share the deep skepticism towards Google's growing clout on the "world text mass" ("Welttextmasse"), the wonderful term coined by the ever good intuition of Peter Glaser. Furthermore it is not acceptable to simply apply US law to Europe. This said, I must add that I don't see either any reasonable perspective in expecting the same committees of stakeholder organizations who so far did not produce a lot more than angry calls for a silly "battle for our culture" may come up now with anything more meaningful or productive than over the past five years, since Google started its digitization of libraries on a grand scale. Instead I consider some European version of a "fair use" formula a desirable perspective, and a European equivalent of the Google settlement is most likely the best and the most realistic way of developing a balanced system for handling copyrighted content on the Internet - with the creators AND the readers in mind. With no such settlement, all that we get is huge bills for lawyers, and little rewards (yet a huge chaos) for everybody else. Interestingly, the outgoing Commissioner for the Information Society at the European Commission, Viviane Reding, has had the most clear words in this respect recently, as she said: "If we do not reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic." As a footnote, I want to add that even if one doesn't buy into the argument of Mrs Reding's statement (which I consider as highly appropriate though), it is to be noted that she at least speaks about that process in a perspective for the future - while most self appointed defenders of the endangered book culture speak of it only in the past tense. The Jedi knights and Dark Vader are certainly great fun in a movie, or a novel. But they do not provide a valid blueprint for what needs to be done for us readers, or for authors or publishers.