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The End of Microsoft's Digital Book Efforts

May 23, 2008 Thanks to Peter Brantley and the Digital Library Federation list, I found out about this little tidbit. In a nutshell, Microsoft is abandoning their digital book efforts, leaving Google as the only major player. Some key excerpts of interest to libraries:

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...

With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries...

We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines...

We are...removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.

I don't know yet what impact this will have on the digitization efforts of the Open Content Alliance, but the removal of any major source of funds is not a good thing.

Posted by Roy Tennant on May 23, 2008 | Comments (1)