When the world first began to realize the potential of the Internet for storing indexing and sharing information, there were several initiatives on leveraging the web for indexing things like scientific journals, and books. While the traditional publishing industry has been a bit slower to adopt this potential whole-heartedly, there have been several initiatives by companies like Microsoft and Google to change all that.
These two companies in particular were hoping to build on the search and research aspects of such shared knowledge from the publishing and academic world, but alas, Microsoft no longer sees the monetary benefits of cultivating such a project. Microsoft has decided to close down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, effective next week.
According to Microsoft, the benefits of having a focused set of resources going towards these projects just isn’t worth it. Coming after the announcements from Microsoft for its pay program and the integrated launch of recently acquired travel search vertical Farecast, it’s clear that Microsoft is shifting gears, trimming the fat in terms of its search components, and redirecting efforts towards those niche areas that will bring Microsoft the most reward in the end.
While Microsoft was good enough to give the original content owners the digital copies of their content, they’ve essentially made Google more prominent in the space, as it is still determined to continue with its hope to digitize and index all the published content in the world. Microsoft feels that crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.
In Microsoft’s blog post about this announcement, the company will be “reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.”
Leaving things up to the developer community is probably a good ida for this particular niche, as the bulk of the traditional publishing industry hasn’t been the speediest to adopt online efforts for searching, indexing and using content. There are, however, a number of networks like Shelfari that will eventually be able to further this process along, and could still take advantage of some of the tools that Microsoft has developed towards this end. 
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