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Digitization, websites to be shut down

Citing poor demand, Microsoft will back away from scanning and indexing books and academic works for Live Search

If future scholarly works show up in Live Search, it won't be due to any extra work on Microsoft's part. The company announced it planned to shutter the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella, senior vice president for search, portal and advertising at the company, said on the Live Search blog how the current sites would be pulled offline next week.

"Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes," said Nadella.

The projects 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," Nadella continued.

Doing this also removes Microsoft from the line of fire regarding the copyrights of published works. By limiting their spidering to content posted by publishers and libraries, the onus of determining proper ownership and rights falls to those who create such repositories.

In contrast, Google has been in hot water with publishers and authors, who allege financial losses will happen from the scanning of books that have been long out of print. Google thinks its book scanning falls under the same kind of fair use that permits it to index websites without seeking the permission of the site owner first.