Microsoft Abandons Book Digitizing

Microsoft has put an abrupt end to its book digitizing project. Next week, the sites will be taken down:

“…”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,” wrote Satya Nadella, a senior vice president at Microsoft, in a matter-of-fact blog post.”

link: Microsoft Gives Up on Book Search

It seems that Microsoft is focused solely on money-making efforts. Projects like indexing all the world’s information remains Google’s initiative. In the long run, that business model might come back to haunt Microsoft.

Catherine Forsythe