'Literature goes online for free in Norway'

Most books published in Norway before 2001 are going online for free thanks to an initiative that may have found the formula to reconcile authors with the web.

At a time when the publishing world is torn over its relationship to the Internet -- which has massively expanded access to books but also threatens royalty revenues -- the National Library of Norway is digitising tens of thousands of titles, from masterworks by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun to the first detective novels by Nordic noir king Jo Nesboe.

The copyright-protected books are available free online -- with the consent of the copyright holders -- at the website www.bokhylla.no ("bookshelf" in Norwegian).

The site currently features 135,000 works and will eventually reach 250,000, including Norwegian translations of foreign books.