The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

Publishers surprised by Microsoft move

28.05.08 Alison Flood

Microsoft's shock decision to wind down its Live Search Books programme has left a host of UK publishers in the lurch, with many having signed up to the programme at the London Book Fair in April.

Participating publishers first heard of the decision on Friday 23rd May when Microsoft director of publisher evangelism Clifford Guren emailed them with the Microsoft statement informing them that book search results would now be integrated in its main search portal, and driven from digitised content on publishers' own sites.

Publishers spoken to by The Bookseller said they had previously been unaware of any plans from Microsoft to withdraw from Live Search Books, with Microsoft presenting the programme at both the London Book Fair in April--when it launched in the UK--and the Independent Publishers Guild conference in March.

"At LBF we spoke to their product manager who was saying how they'd put so much effort into polishing the front end—and I thought it looked really sharp and slick," said Red Squirrel Publishing editor Henry Dillon. "I was part way through migrating our content from Google Books Search to Microsoft Live when this happened . . . Microsoft's user interface is much slicker than Google's--it's sad to see all their hard work being moth-balled." Bloomsbury also announced in April that it had joined the Live Search programme, and was in the process of digitising its backlist. It has not yet commented on Microsoft's decision.

"The negative impact of this is that it removes significant competition from Google, who already dominated the book digitisation and search space but are now once again more or less the sole players," said Pan Macmillan head of digital publishing Sara Lloyd. CUP sales and marketing director (EMEA) Pete Shemilt added: "I was surprised and disappointed. I think competition is healthy in the search market. And I was surprised at the timing as they'd only just gone live in the UK."

Microsoft said that it had digitised 750,000 books and indexed 80m journal articles since it launched the programme in 2005. The group said that it intended to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books.

Microsoft launched Live Book Search in 2005 as a competitor to Google's Book Search initiative. Microsoft said the decision was "the result of a strategic decision on our part to focus our investments in new vertical search areas where we believe we can more effectively differentiate Live Search". Microsoft said that it had decided that instead of digitising book content itself, the best way for a search engine to make book content available would be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.

"I think that what this does is put more responsibility onto the publisher to actually work on their own digitisation. Ultimately speaking it is an opportunity for publishers to take responsibility themselves rather than handing it over to a third party," said Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) project director Mark Bide.

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