Quietly, and almost unnoticed, Microsoft's
Live Search Books project has passed away, after digitizing a quarter of a million books. Competition with Google Book Search, however, is not cited as a reason for its demise:
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.
So basically, Microsoft is committed to continue to give money to libraries and publishers to digitize their own books themselves and place the content on the web, and then Microsoft will just index those pages for them, thank you very much.
It certainly would have saved them some face if they had just left the content up, or transfered the 750,000 public domain books to another digital archive.
Microsoft has released in (βeta) their
Live Search Books, which contains searchable scans of thousands of pre-1927 titles in the public domain. More information is available on
Live Search's Weblog.
Unfortunately, for our purposes, this is slightly less than useful. Let's see: "
Thomas Hardy." Good! "
Ezra Pound." Okay. "
T.S. Eliot?" Not so much. Oh, well.
Microsoft has also gone live with
Live Search Academic, their response to Google Scholar.
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1561. Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 37, 39.
Gardner credits Reed with two suggestions as to the sources of "The Dry Salvages" (refuted by Eliot, himself) and "Burnt Norton."
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