Live Search Books goes up in
flames; the content lives on

Microsoft has released a statement informing users that Live Search Books and Live Search Academic will shut down this week.

"Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes," wrote SVP Satya Nadella of search, portal and advertising at Microsoft.

Nadella added, "We are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs."

Microsoft plans instead to focus on developing "an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner."

According to the statement, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic 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," Nadella concluded.

Microsoft first launched the Live Search Books and Academic projects to combat Google Print. The latter was later renamed Google Book Search to wed the notion of digitized books to Google's core proposition of improving search in general, as well as to ease publishers' and authors' concerns that Google was cannibalizing their industry and violating copyright.

Despite the benign name change, Google began selling online books in March 2006.