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Microsoft Joins Yahoo! Book Search Plan
tanman writes "The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has signed on to 'work with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, to initially put 150,000 works online. The move comes as Google faces growing legal pressure from publishers over its own global digital library plans.'"
The internet archive has been involved with this for more than 8 years. Amazon also has had the search inside the book for longer than Google has been running google print.
Once they start putting college texts online, then we'll talk. Paying $160 for the book that you use for one semester, and getting $30 for giving it back to the school so that they can resell it again next semester for $175... Psshhtt. Let's talk searchable texts, or downloading only one chapter for a partial price. Kind of like iTunes - don't want the full cd? Buy one song. Novels? Give me the paper version any day. Of course, the sooner I go blind from staring at the beautifully unnatural glow of my computer screen, the sooner I don't have to worry about this issue anyway. How about something that gives suggestions based on what you've read? We have that for music, shouldn't be too hard for books. There are so many possibilities available to us if these things are available online. Everyone is so uptight about "rights" that they don't see what can really be done. The problem isn't the people that "steal" - it's the system that's not working. When you overcharge for something, people find other ways of getting it. They share books. They download music and movies. Instead of persecuting them, take a look at why the system is having problems, and fix that instead.
This sentence is false.