RSSMicrosoft to Digitize 100,000 Books
By Ed Oswald | Published November 4, 2005, 2:40 PM
Not to be left out of the party, Microsoft joined the online book movement Friday by announcing a deal with the British Library to digitize 25 million pages of content from the library's collection during the next year. The two organizations also plan to continue the process after the first phase is complete.
Google announced early on Thursday that it was going ahead with plans to digitize books as part of its Google Print initiative. The news was followed Thursday afternoon by Amazon unveiling a program that would allow consumers to purchase portions of and entire books for viewing online.
About 100,000 out-of-copyright books will be digitized by Microsoft -- ten times the number of books that are already available from Google Print -- for a new service called MSN Book Search. Microsoft hopes to have a beta available sometime next year.
"Our partnership with the British Library is not only about digitization and preservation, but also about delivering a great experience for people accessing this amazing collection through British Library and MSN Web sites," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in a statement.
Microsoft recently became a member of the Open Content Alliance, a group comprised of Yahoo and the Internet Archive, which is attempting to digitize books in the public domain, or where the copyright holder has given permission for the content to be brought online.
The company has already been working with the British Library to provide the infrastructure necessary to carry out the initiative to create a digital library. The system will be based upon open standards, the two groups said.
"This is great news for research and scholarship and will give unparalleled access to our vast collections to people all over the world: the items digitised will be available to anyone, anywhere and at any time," said British library head Lynee Brindley.
Imitation is the sincerest form ...of imitation !
The Computer Rodent
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Good beginning, but:
1. This is not digitizing of books, this is digitizing of particular copies, variants, editions etc. from a single library. Other libraries have the same books, but they are all different. They have different bindings, different book-plates, different watermarks ... which are also valuable for any serious historian.
2. This is all about English language publications of 19th and 20th century. Most of the English publications up to the end of 18th century are already digitized by several companies and sold to major libraries. French National Library has a similar project "Gallica" with thousands of books freely available online.
3. Digitized does not mean read. Contemporary scanning software is not able to read old printed texts in any language without making serious mistakes. They have to be proofread. I do not know how MS is going to handle the Latin texts or citations in Latin. They do not have a Latin proofreader for MS Word.
4. It's a long and dangerous way to go. I just hope that the libraries would not destroy the "digitized" books.
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Weird, my comment posted to the wrong article.
[DELETED]
BUG!
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I admit it... as a student, I love this idea. Sitting in class with a TabletPC, a wireless internet connection, and eBooks that I can search through is a lot more satisfying to me than sitting down with a big textbook that I have to thumb through to find that one line that I actually care about.
I think all authors and publishers should produce work in an eBook format from now on... I'm OK with buying them... I just want the conveniences that come with them.
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That is pretty much the only thing I use my PDA for anymore. E-Books.
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I agree. this was a great idea.
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What I would like to know is how they "digitize" these books. Does someone sit in office with a scanner for 18 hours a day copying one or two pages at a time? It sounds like a job from hell.
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Keep in mind that in order to go to print in the first place, many (though admittedly not all) of these books are already digitized in an electronic format somewhere-- usually at the publisher's.
The first *smart* step is contacting publishers and getting copies of the original documents. The next step is taking the ones they don't get and having a bunch of low-level, underpaid but overworked flunkies and have them sit at a scanner, lol.
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There is no point in digitizing a book unless the text is live, meaning you can actively search the document, as opposed to every page just being an image.
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This is funny, how many people always claiming that everyone is copying Microsoft but yet Microsoft is doing nothing but following google's lead anymore LOL.
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Microsoft always copies from other companies. They make a few changes and then they use their money and power to force the little companies out of business. Good thing that now they have met their match, so the next few years should be interesting.
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The difference being Microsoft is actually getting permission.
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Although I don't agree with all MS practices, I'm glad to hear they are doing this as well. Competition usually pushes better products.
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What I Like to Know Is why Everyone thinking that Microsft is fowllowing Google When Digitizing Books has been around since the 70's The Gutenberg Project http://www.gutenberg.org/ has been around way longer that Google Print. Google wasn't the Smart one to come up with the Idea And shouldn't be getting all the Credit their is definetly way too much hype and Has gotten out of hand.
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There is also project64, and 100 others. I said that Microsoft is following Google only because they that's how it appears.
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Seriously, why Do You write Like This?
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Project Gutenberg and others only provide public domain works. Also they don't provide a search engine that allows you to search all of those books as if they were pages on the web. Do you see the difference now?
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Isn't that a Nintendo 64 emulator?
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It's that too. It's also a documentation project to recover and digitize all Commodore 64 (and associated devices and software) Documentation.
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LOL, That is Really Hilarious :)
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