Twelve million scanned pages in more than 110,000 EU publications are available free of charge for download in the EU Bookshop Digital Library. Launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair on the 16 October, it offers all publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952.
The Publications Office's archives have long represented a veritable treasure trove of European history. Publications such as the address delivered by Mr Jean Monnet, President of the High Authority before the Common Assembly at the first session of September 1952, or the
General Report on the activities of the Community in French from 1953 can once again see the virtual light of day through the Publications Office Digital Library.
New publications are added every day. In the words of Leonard Orban, Commissioner for multilingualism: “The digital library frees the memory of the European Union tied to paper since its beginning. The millions
of pages now accessible to everyone in the 23 official languages demonstrate the continued commitment of the European Union to preserve and encourage the history of the Union in its linguistic diversity.”
The Publications Office Digital Library was a response to a growing demand to digitise out-of-print publications. In 2007, the Publications Office launched a PDF-on-demand service, wherein users could request publications to be retrieved from the archives and scanned as
needed. The demand was so high that within six months the service was saturated. To better serve the users, it was decided to scan the industrial volumes of the entire archive.
