Microsoft gives up on book scanning project
Microsoft Corp. is abandoning its effort to scan whole libraries and make their contents searchable, a sign it may be getting choosier about the fights it will pick with Google Inc. The world’s largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month. Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday. Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.
Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site. Unlike Google, whose decision to scan books still protected under copyright law has provoked multiple lawsuits, Microsoft stuck to scanning books with the permission of publishers or that were firmly in the public domain. The company said it will give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed. The field is now clear for Google and Yahoo, which were dominating the book search market anyway…
Source: AP
Comments(12)
Who would have guessed?
come on!!!!!! i dont want to leave the house to go to the library… get scanny you rich mothers!!!
they have been dancing on too many weddings over the past anyway. They should start again on what they were once good at.
Make better OS for instance.
@Chris:
I agree. Microsoft is acting like the spoiled little kid. Everything google does, MS has to do too LMAO. Then they realise that it’s just a complete drain of resources and voila, they drop it again. Wasting complete manyears of resources that could have gone in to the one thing microsoft *could* be good at: Making OS’es
MS Os may not be perfect, but they are omnipresent.
For as long as we need them, I would at least like them to run properly/perfectly.
As soon as Linux or MacOS become a 100% alternative (including 100% games compatibility), MS OS will turn into a relict I’m quite sure.
ms had a good project
lol at MS
@4
Indeed, spoilt kids they are. They can’t even copy other companies ideas properly without messing things up ie. Vista the Os X wannabe. Not a good year so far for them.
I installed the vista theme on my fedora and then when my friend come to visit me i say look i got vista!!
NOTTTTTTTTTTTTT
Scanning billions of books, sounds like a lot of work and money!
So, where are all those books available from?
A great idea gone to waste. Information to the masses as many say.
It’s a shame a hope to bring information to the world was faltered by the effects of corporations and wall street.