May 23, 2008
Microsoft Shuts Book-Digitizing Project
Microsoft announced today that it would shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic programs, which have digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.
The scanned materials could be searched through Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, sites that will be taken down next week. The materials will still be available through the main Live Search site, but no additional books will be digitized.
In a letter to publishing partners and in a blog post, Microsoft said it was abandoning Live Search Academic and Live Search Books “to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel.” Microsoft has also recently announced a bigger change in its search-business model — a cash-back program that will pay users to search for products through Live Search.
Microsoft’s book-digitizing program was begun in a beta version in 2006 with great fanfare — and with many comparisons to Google’s more comprehensive (and controversial) Google Book Search, which scans thousands of books per day through its library partners and has attracted a major lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement. Microsoft digitized only books that were already in the public domain or for which it had explicit permission from copyright owners.
Microsoft will provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Friday May 23, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: MIT Computer Scientist Included Among 100 Top Intellectuals
Next: Microsoft Ramps Up Its Free College E-Mail Program
This is a pity. Competition would have been very good. I have quite some bad experiences with the Google book program. Google seems to be only interested in large commercial publishing companies. Communication with Google company is in practice impossible.
— Ad Lagendijk May 24, 07:18 AM #
Google stands to lose position as first choice reference source if there are copyrighted holes in its base. Too bad Microsoft dropped out.
— Paul R. Cooper May 27, 08:31 PM #