Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it plans to launch a service known as MSN Book Search next year, with the intention of improving the search experience for users. As part of this, says Microsoft, it has agreed to support the Open Content Alliance, a recently launched consortium, led by Yahoo!, that aims to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitised text and multimedia content.
According to reports, Microsoft has agreed to pay for the scanning and digitising of 150,000 books in the next year.
The initiative will help address the fact that over half of people’s online queries go unanswered today on search engines, according to internal Microsoft research.
While MSN Book Search will begin with books, Microsoft expects that the scheme will branch out to include all types of offline content. It will, however, seek to avoid copyright problems by focusing on public domain works and works for which it, and the Alliance, have permission to include in the project.
This is in contrast to Google, which has adopted an opt-out policy in respect of its library project, and is now facing legal actions brought earlier this month by publishers and authors, concerned as to how the scheme will impact on their copyrights.
