Christopher Kata

Books: The Next File-Sharing Frontier?

Hi Mathew!
The interesting part of the Microsoft story is not that they are getting out of the book scanning business, but rather that they were contributing to open service (on the order of millions of dollars) which was contributing scanned books to the Internet Archive. In fact MS allowed the Internet Archive to keep the scanners in place continue on with the work. So in fact, the service has not gone away but rather has simply suffered a drop in funding to continue with the work.

Google's option is not open - it's a closed system that can only be accessed through Google's search engine.

Microsoft's initiative through the Internet Archive is a far better, more open solution that likely will one day become funded by the public just as libraries are today. While the scanning technology is a little more expensive than off the shelf scanners, the service wrote their own software that transfers the scans to the central servers for processing and only costs $0.10 / page (roughly $30 per book) to execute. That's cheaper than a physical library and reaches far more people.

So I for one am hoping that the Internet Archive is able to replace the funds that MS was contributing to the initiative so that it does not fold.