The day after I’m highlighting OCLC and Google getting closer together to make it easier to find books and their digitised versions, Microsoft announces they are getting out of that game.

The Microsoft Live Search team announces on their blog that they are winding down Book Search:

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

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.

Not continuing the service they developed in partnership with the Internet Archive, CCS, and others, they are giving away what they have amassed:

… 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.

It is interesting that they have come to the realisation 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.  – The question of course is who’s search engine.

Without doing much reading between the lines, it is clear that Microsoft have failed to see a business model in the worthy job of digitizing the world’s books.  I wonder if there is one, or does the answer lay with open data projects like the Open Library, the Million Book Project, and the sharing of libraries.