This was published 17 years ago
Microsoft starts online library in challenge to Google Books
Microsoft launched an online library in a move that pits the world's biggest software company against Google's controversial project to digitize the world's books.
Microsoft said the US test version of Live Search Books featured tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books, including works held by the British library and major universities in the United States and Canada.
"Live Search Books is advancing the way people search online by digitizing and indexing information from the world's printed materials," a Microsoft spokesman told AFP.
"There is a lot of trusted and authoritative content that can only be found in books today. We want to make that content accessible to people who are using Live Search."
A visit to Live Search Books at website http://books.live.com revealed an uncluttered page with a box for seeking scanned works.
Searches by key words or author names quickly returned works such as the fourth century Taoist teachings of Lieh Tzu and "The Count of Monte-Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas that could be easily viewed page-by-page.
"With this initial release we've focused on making the reading experience as natural as possible," project director Cliff Guren wrote in a weblog entry posted on the website of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington.
"The US beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that has been off-limits to the traditional search experience, until now."
Microsoft has book-scanning partnerships with New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine, according to Guren. It also has agreements with the University of California system and the University of Toronto.
In August, Google restarted its Google Book Search project initiated in 2004 with the aim of scanning every literary work into digital format and making them available online.
Google has formed partnerships with the New York Public Library and major universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Complutense of Madrid and the University of California to add their collections to its virtual book shelves.
The Mountain View, California-based Internet powerhouse has stored on its searchable database classic works in the public domain, along with copyrighted books either sent with or without the publishers' permission.
Live Search Books "was created with copyright laws in mind," according to Microsoft.
"It is focused on scanning and indexing out-of-copyright books or books where we have the express written consent of the copyright holder to scan them," a company spokesman said.
Microsoft's Windows Live Publisher program was devoted to obtaining the rights to digitize copyrighted books.
After outcries from publishing houses and authors, Google modified its online library to offer only summaries of copyrighted works along with information regarding where to buy or borrow the books.
Google claimed the right of "freedom of quotation" to pull up search results from books.
Google has rejected claims that, being based in the United States, it has favored English and it promised it would next roll out a Google Book Search in French.
Opposition to the project, particularly by French and US editors, resulted in a group of book publishers forming the Open Content Alliance (xOCA) in October of 2005.
The OCA is a non-profit organisation which joins together an array of universities, foundations, and data processors to create a "common pot" of digitized books available online for download or printing.
The OCA got the support of Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, which was to tailor a search engine for the alliance and finance converting 18,000 books to digital format.
Microsoft has promised to contribute 150,000 digitized books to the OCA collection. The OCA hoped to recruit the National Library of France, where 90,000 books have already been scanned.
Neither Google nor Microsoft would reveal how many books they have already scanned.
At stake for the companies were revenues that could be raked in by placing ads on web pages visited by book-seeking Internet surfers.
Court decisions regarding copyright protections, and which search engine wins over the most coveted collections of written works are expected to be pivotal in the battle of the online libraries.
AFP