Microsoft stops scanning books

    Microsoft said that after one and a half years of work, it is curtailing projects for scanning books and magazines. At the same time, a similar project from Google continues to go in full swing, so there can only be one conclusion: Microsoft simply could not stand the competition. Live Search Books

    Freeze Newsand the Live Search Academic came a few days after Microsoft officially announced that it would focus on some specific areas of Internet search in which it could compete with Google. Obviously, full-text book searches do not belong to such areas. It is unlikely that such a service can be easily monetized, especially since the cost of scanning is very high. In principle, this is a rather specific search area, the number of users of which is limited to librarians, researchers, the most inquisitive students, and so on. However, experts emphasize that such people are among the "early adopters" and have a great influence on the total mass of users.

    Both Google and Microsoft were engaged in scanning old books and magazines, which have already become public property by virtue of the limitation. In addition, Google without permission scans copyrighted works and provides small quotes from these books for search queries, which does not contradict the law on copyright and related rights, although it rages book publishers.

    Before the project ended, Microsoft managed to crawl and index 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles. The main work was done for Microsoft money by specialists of the nonprofit organization Internet Archive (by the way, some libraries preferred to deal with this organization rather than with Google, due to the restrictions that Google imposes on digital files). Now Internet Archive is forced to seek a new sponsor to continue to scan 1,000 books a day.

    Google has partnered with the New York Public Library, as well as Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the University of Michigan. Since 2004, the company has already scanned more than a million books and plans to increase this number to 15 million over the next ten years. Books are placed in Google’s own search index, which is denied access by other search engines.

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