Microsoft moves to digitize books from the British Library

IDG News Service - The scanning race has started: Microsoft Corp. announced an agreement today to scan 25 million pages from the British Library's collection that will eventually be made available on its MSN Book Search site next year.
Around 100,000 books from the British Library's 13 million book collection will be digitized, according to a joint statement. MSN Book Search, launched earlier this month, is scheduled for a beta release next year.
The agreement comes as Microsoft's competitors, including Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are aggressively moving to compile online libraries of books amid copyright concerns. The titles to be scanned at the British Library are no longer under copyright restrictions.
Microsoft is contracting with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco that works on digital preservation projects, to do the scanning, said Richard Boulderstone, director of e-strategy at the British Library. Microsoft is not paying the library for access, but the library will benefit, as it has been working for the past 10 years on digitization and has so far digitized only 0.2% of its vast collection, Boulderstone said.
"Actually, for us to have some of these commercial players come along and want to work with us on digitizing these collections, it's fantastic," Boulderstone said.
Microsoft's announcement comes as Google said yesterday that it had made a significant addition of scans from public-domain books to its Google Print site. The company is working from the collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.
Google is also facing two copyright infringement lawsuits over the scanning of copyright works in those collections, a practice that the company has halted but vows to resume, citing laws that allow certain liberties with the use of protected material. Google said it will focus on out-of-print and older selections.
Yahoo and Microsoft have thrown their support behind the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group based in San Francisco working to digitize public-domain text and films. The Internet Archive is one member of the OCA. Yahoo has offered to index content and fund the digitization of a collection of American literature selected by the University of California.
MSN said last week it is talking with libraries and publishers about offering copyrighted material in its index. Microsoft eventually plans to build a business model around the search service for copyright works but so far has said it doesn't intend to charge for searches of noncopyrighted material.

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