France's Sarkozy takes on Google in books dispute

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday he would not let his country's literary heritage be taken away by a "friendly" large American company, in a thinly veiled challenge to Google. France is anxious to avoid French-language literature being swallowed by major international digitisation projects and is looking to create its own national digital champion. "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," Sarkozy said, without naming Google. At a public round table meeting in eastern France, the president said digitisation of books would be one of the projects financed by a planned national loan, which is due to pump billions of euros into strategic investments in 2010.