QUILLBLOG

Microsoft’s Live Book Search dies

Microsoft is abandoning its Live Book Search venture after withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitization project. The company announced Friday that it will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic websites and stop scanning library and copyright books, instead relying on other library and digitization partners for book content.

Microsoft had scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date – that material will still be available in search results, but not through separate indexes.

Columnist Andrew Orlowski of U.K. tech website The Register suggests that Microsoft is “effectively handing the future of the book to Google,” which, unlike the Open Content Alliance, doesn’t ask for permission from copyright holders before scanning content.

He writes:

For this, the ad giant has received lawsuits in the U.S. and France from authors and publishers. Google has fought back using sock puppets of its own. Stanford Law School’s anti-copyright centre has been helping out the Google cause – and received a $2M thank you in return.

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Yet the policy will be brutally effective, with Google holding a monopoly on the printed word in book form.

Microsoft says it will donate the books digitised by Live Book Search to the copyright holders. Meanwhile, Google will surely never see a monopoly fall into its lap quite so easily. The future of digital books is now entirely in its hands.

Meanwhile, Nate Anderson of the Ars Technica technology website posits that the end of Live Book Search might actually be a good thing for the future of books:

The loss of resources is “significant,” [Open Content Alliance member Brewster Kahle] tells Ars, but “if we can’t pick it up from here,” then the OCA deserves to falter. Microsoft and other corporations like Yahoo have gotten the project off the ground by providing the initial scanning stations and developing the expertise needed to do the project right. While Microsoft is taking its cash with it, the company is leaving in place all the equipment that it paid for and is releasing all scans of public domain works for any use, not just education and research. According to Kahle, Microsoft has done more than it is contractually obligated to do as it ramps down its involvement with OCA.

In a way, Kahle sees the retreat of the corporations from OCA as a necessary step, perhaps even a good one. He’s a firm believer in the idea that corporations should not be the entities we trust to provide access to important cultural data stores. If people think that corporations are the right way to access the history of human discourse, Kahle says they’re in for “a series of very rude shocks.” (The University of Michigan, which has thrown in its lot with Google, does not agree.)

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