Microsoft to End Its Live Book Search Program

Today, Microsoft announced it was ending its forays into digitizing books and searching their contents online. This comes not even a year after opening the Live Book Search program to publishers like Wheatmark. (See our original post here.)

What it means is that MSN and live.com will no longer index and host the content of your book, but Amazon's Search Inside and Google Book Search will continue to do so. So when you want Wheatmark to submit your book for Inside Search, we will continue to submit it both to Google and Amazon for indexing.

By the way, this announcement doesn't mean that Microsoft has abandoned the indexing and searching of book content online. If you read it carefully, they are working on ways to get publishers to use their indexing technology to do the work themselves. When a publisher has done the online indexing and has set up the book content on its own site, MSN and live.com will continue to provide search results from the book's content! With indexing, hosting, and copyright headaches out of the way, this does sound like a smart move to me!