By Claudine Beaumont and agencies Published: 7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2009  French President Nicolas Sarkozy says that he will not allow France's digital heritage to be 'stripped' by American companies Photo: AFP / GETTY  France is on the verge of establishing its own French-language book digitisation project, in order to prevent what Mr Sarkozy described as a "friendly" large American company taking away its digital heritage.  Although he did not name Google directly, Mr Sarkozy was thought to be alluding to the search giant, which has recently attracted criticism from authors, publishers and libraries for its plans to scan out-of-copyright books and make them digitally searchable online.  "We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," said the French president.  He told the audience at a public meeting that a French book digitisation project would be financed by a national loan.  "We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitisation project," he said.  France is grappling with how best to manage the digital revolution, which is affecting everything from music to movies. The French prime minister, Francois Fillon, has established a commission to look at the best ways of insulating the publishing industry from the difficulties that faced the record labels and film studios, while still innovating in the internet age. He said that he wanted to avoid another cultural industry being "threatened by looting".  Mr Fillon suggested that scanning the content of Europe's libraries could be one such strategy, as could applying internet privacy laws to the publishing industry and helping to develop the market and demand for legal digital book downloads.  France has already come down hard on illegal filesharers, passing a law that allows the authorities to disconnect persistent offenders.  The French government will hope that any new book digitisation scheme is more successful than Quaero, the Franco-German project launched in 2005 to build a multimedia search engine. The project has struggled to attract funding, and progress is proving slow.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he would not allow American companies to    'strip' France of its literary heritage