Microsoft has announced that it will be digitising books in what will be called Live Book Search. This service will include a partnership for publishers to provide books to Microsoft, and they will scan them for free to make portions of them available online through something called the Windows Live Book Publisher Program. Microsoft will also scan books that are out of copyright and make them available online.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Live Book Search sounds suspiciously similar to Google Book Search. For those not familiar with the project, Book Search allows publishers to submit books for scan, and also provides entire scans of out-of-print books from selected libraries.
Microsoft, the we-didn’t-think-about-it-first-but-we’ll-produce-our-own-version-anyway company.
2 Comments
Ilanah · October 19, 2006 at 9:07 am
There's nothing wrong with that. It's why we don't give copyright in ideas or (if you're English) patents in business methods.
Andres Guadamuz · October 19, 2006 at 10:14 am
Indeed. I was thinking of the moral issue. This is how Microsoft has done its money.