14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's exploration of analog text has come to an end. Satya Nadella, the company's senior vice president search, portal and advertising announced at the end of the past week that Microsoft was pulling the plug on the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. Both websites will be taken down completely, Live Search remaining the sole index for books and scholarly publications.
But not only the two websites and their respective indexes will be affected by the decision to no longer accumulate content from books and academic articles. Nadella explained that Microsoft would also discontinue its digitization efforts. Until now, for Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, Microsoft had run programs focused on library scanning and in-copyright books, gathering a consistent volume of content. However, the Redmond company is now shifting its strategy entirely.
"With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles," Nadella added. "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."
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic dead, Microsoft plans to rely exclusively on publishers and libraries in order to continue to make content available to users through its search engine. Nadella reached out to former partners inviting them to build their own digital archives and to make them available to both readers and search engines.
"We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a catalyst for more sustainable strategies. To that end, we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications," Nadella concluded.