France has long resented the fact that all the big public databases are in American, and believes that heavy investment in building local ones will enable it to extend the influence of French thinking – and the French language – around the world, as well as generating a lot of money, but United Press International reports a survey that pours very cold water on all those hopes: it reports that while there are over 3,000 serious databases in operation, two thirds of them generate annual income of less than $100,000 (to put that into perspective, paper delivery of Computergram generates some $600,000 annually); the Lexis legal and the Nexis news databases that are operated by Mead Data Central are still the only really big moneyspinners.
