Microsoft announced on Friday that the company will close its book digitization project. According to the official Live Search blog:
"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. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities. "Read more about the announcement and see the full email from Microsoft at the
Washington Post. You can also read the email on the
Live Search Books Publisher Program site.
Read a reaction to the announcement at
Digitization 101,
Archivalia and
TeleRead. And find out more about book digitization by reading this
New York Times article from last year.
Haven't had enough of digitization? Check out the National Archives and Records Administration’s
Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials.
Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.
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