The EU Bookshop website hosts an electronic library containing 12 million scanned pages from over 110,000 historical publications. A further two million pages from more recent ones are also included.
The site, launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, features all publications edited by the EU's Publications Office on behalf of the European institutions, agencies and other associated bodies since 1952.
New publications will be added every day at a rate of up to 1,600 per year.
"With the digital library, we have total transparency" of EU legislative and cultural publications, Multilingualism Commissioner Leonard Orban told AFP on Sunday, adding: "No-one can complain now of problems consulting legislative texts and associated documents."
The commissioner also expressed hope that EU Bookshop would become "an additional tool for combating prejudices".
Users can choose to access content from over 370 EU institutional authors in 50 languages, including Russian, Chinese and all 23 official languages of the Union, and are given the option of ordering printed copies.
The European Commission described EU Bookshop as "one of most ambitious projects of its type in the world", and expressed hope that it will become "a valuable information source for citizens, journalists, education professionals, students, librarians, publishers and anybody interested in Europe".
The Publications Office had previously provided a PDF-on-demand service, whereby users could request documents from the archive as required.
But within six months of its launch in 2007, demand for scanned documents had become so high that the office decided to scan its entire archive.
Commissioner Orban said "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 preserving and encouraging the history of the Union in its linguistic diversity," he stated.
Content hosted by EU Bookshop will also be made available on Europeana, another EU digitisation project launched in November 2008 (EurActiv 21/11/08), complementing national collections currently hosted by the site with contributions from the EU institutions.
