Had he remained in the racing world as a trainer or thoroughbred expert after retiring from riding in 1957, Dick Francis would have been remembered as one of the most successful jockeys of his era.

Mr. Francis, who died Sunday at age 89, would also be remembered as the jockey who spectacularly managed to lose in the 1956 Grand National, Great Britain's most famous steeplechase. A photograph of him within a whisker of the finish line, aboard Queen Elizabeth's horse Devon Loch, flat on its belly with four legs helplessly splayed out, is one of racing's strangest images. To "do a Devon Loch" is a still a byword for losing a race from a seemingly unassailable position.

But the disaster actually helped launch Mr. Francis's subsequent career as a journalist and then as horse racing's most eloquent writer of thrillers. Almost all his books became international best-sellers, and they made Mr. Francis a wealthy man.

After the death in 2000 of Mary Francis, his wife of 53 years and a close collaborator on his books, Mr. Francis expressed doubts that he would ever write another novel. "She was the moving force behind my writing," he said. "I don't think I shall write again other than letters now. So much of my work was her."

Indeed, he didn't write another novel until Under Orders in 2006. That novel brought back Sid Halley, the retired steeplechase jockey who was his champion sleuth.

Although he did not name Google directly, Mr Sarkozy was thought to be alluding to the search giant, which has recently attracted criticism from authors, publishers and libraries for its plans to scan out-of-copyright books and make them digitally searchable online.

"We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," said the French president. He told the audience at a public meeting that a French book digitisation project would be financed by a national loan. "We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitisation project," he said.

France is grappling with how best to manage the digital revolution, which is affecting everything from music to movies. The French prime minister, Francois Fillon, has established a commission to look at the best ways of insulating the publishing industry from the difficulties that faced the record labels and film studios, while still innovating in the internet age. He said that he wanted to avoid another cultural industry being "threatened by looting".

His book, Pays Perdu (Lost Land), paints a brutal but comic portrait of the 10-house hamlet at the end of a winding track in the hills of central France. The words "alcohol", "solitude" and "merde" all feature prominently. Written in the style of a novel but based on real characters and events, it focuses on a young girl's funeral attended by one-toothed peasants, raucous shepherdesses and village idiots.

The 25 members of the five families that live in Lussaud only read the book a year after it was published. They were outraged. Their community, they discovered, resembled "a hamlet of bandits in the Pashtoun tribal zone. Even those who live in the neighbouring village consider people here as foreigners, some kind of outlaws." Locals do indeed eye strange cars with suspicion. Just when the visitor feels like turning back, stone houses with the region's typical lava slated roofs appear. Beyond a cemetery and an ancient bread oven an old farmer tends to his flowers to the sound of cow bells, barking sheepdogs and cockerels. The smell of manure and hay is strong.

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His main crime in the village's eyes was to have recounted tales gathered from years of talking in confidence. "I naively assumed that any story told to me in such a tiny place was common knowledge," he said. But one case of alleged adultery going back 40 years was unknown to the former lovers' respective children until the book's release. Worse, the children had ended up marrying each other.