You, too, could be seduced by Google!

My French is not very good, but with the help of Google's Language Tools, I've learned that when Le Figaro writes "La BNF se laisse séduire par Google", it means that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has been seduced by Google. A strange image, to be sure, but we know all about the French and sex, don't we?

Along with l'amour, the other big French words I know are la résistance and la collaboration, so when the famous literary blogger Pierre Assouline wrote, "Il aura donc fallu quatre ans pour que la BNF passe de la résistance à la collaboration," Google told me he said, "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Mon Dieu! What's going on here?

Well, France's national library is going to digitize some of its 30 million books with the help of the popular search engine, and that's not a popular decision with those Left Bank intellectuals who cry "cultural imperialism" whenever the non-French world produces something supérieur. But while the Parisian elites are agonizing about their books, the pragmatic VisitBritain tourism agency is working with Google to create maps of historic sites such as Stonehenge. To get photos of these places, the Google Maps team is using a 360-degree camera and what the French would call a triporteur. It's a seductive stratégie.