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Closing the Cover on Microsoft Book Scanning
Chris_Keene writes "The Live Search blog announces that the Live.com Book and Academic Search are to close. Book search in particular has had quite a bit of coverage, and often seemed like a race with Google. The Live blog says 'we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users [...] this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.'"
Actually, this is right on track with Microsoft's established business practice. Start doing something that the public supports and that their customers desire, hype it up, achieve good will, and then give up half way in and drop all support for it (and if possible pretend it never existed).
Okay just to clarify, I believe that it is their official policy (leaned from friends who work there) to have their employees use live search first and only use alternate service (read: google) if they cannot find what they are looking for. They also are encouraged to provide feedback on what they couldn't find.
The fact is that libraries are the good guys in the fight to preserve information for the future generations, while the Googles and Microsofts are just corporate fly by night outfits in comparison.
It's not even that their scanning secrets are worth that much. Generally, the quality of Google's scans is not very good, and somebody will have to do it all again in the future anyway. They skimp on resolution, and don't clean the pages properly.
If you'd like to see scanning done right, take a look at Goettingen's Library. Their scans of historical math works are of a very high standard, the best I've seen around the web, certainly better than the Michigan, Cornell or Gallica offerings. Another project with the right humanitarian attitude is the Million Books Project, which is doing highly interesting work in the Chinese universities.
The public domain books that MS scanned are all stored on Archive.org. The scanning quality is superior to Google scanning. With Google's books you are lucky to get through a book that is not missing pages or does not contain blurry images. MS helped build the scanning centers, and they are turning them over completely to Archive.org who intends to continue scanning about a 1000 books a day. MS also is cancelling any contractional restrictions on the use of these books, so that the scans themselves can also be freely used.