I just wanted to say a few words that are unfortunately in opposition to what the hon. Gentleman has just said. The danger in the

amendment is twofold. First, it takes away from the librarians and archivists a decision about the best medium of preservation. That would worry me. I do not impugn for one minute the publishing industry, but it would be easy to opt for the cheapest medium to be deposited at the relevant legal deposit library rather than the best medium that might be useful for the long-term preservation of that material.

Secondly, and allied to that, a legal deposit library may have collected that type of material in a particular format for several years and made it available to readers in that format. For the publisher to insist on offering it in a different format, even though it is still available in the old format, would make it difficult for that library to deal with its readers. It would be difficult to make the material constantly available.

Let me give an example. This does not come under the aegis of the Bill but it is work that I used to do and it illustrates the point. If a library collects a video archive of the output of S4C on Betamax, it should be allowed to continue to do so on Betamax because it has the necessary machines to make that archive available to the public. If the publisher says that it must not be made available, or that it must be collected on DVD, that would put an extra strain on resources, storage, conservation and possible cataloguing.