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Jeremy Kirk at InfoWorld:
The scanning race has started: Microsoft announced an agreement Friday to scan 25 million pages from the British Library’s collection that will eventually be made available on its MSN Book Search site next year.
Around 100,000 books from the British Library’s 13 million book collection will be digitized, according to a joint press release. MSN Book Search, launched earlier this month, is scheduled for a beta release next year.
The agreement comes as Microsoft’s competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, are aggressively moving toward compiling online libraries of books amid copyright concerns. The titles to be scanned at the British Library are no longer under copyright restrictions.
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MSN said last week it is talking with libraries and publishers about offering copyrighted material in its index. Microsoft eventually plans to build a business model around the search service for copyright works, but so far has said it doesn’t intend to charge for searches of noncopyrighted material.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:07 PM
[...] Live Search Books was announced in October 2005 as MSN Book Search with considerable hoopla, plans to digitize the British Library, and verbal fisticuffs with Google over copyright and Google Book Search, but it has all come to nought as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella announced today: Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. [...]