Scanning books to improve the company’s book search apparently hasn’t proven very profitable for Microsoft, which is pulling the plug on its book search page and its book scanning.
Users will still be able to search already-scanned material — 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly articles — through Microsoft’s main search engine, the company announced on its blog.
Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, 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. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. 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.
I assume this leaves Google as the only private company that is trying to scan all the world’s books. Given the difficulty of scanning many volumes, I doubt the effort will ever turn a profit for Google, either, but the company appears committed.
Publishers and authors aren’t so sure it’s a good idea — or even a legal one.
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