Microsoft joins the book search bandwagon

In the wake of lawsuits filed against Google, Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would join a competing and less controversial library book digitisation project sponsored by Internet Archive and Yahoo!.

Danielle Tiedt, general manager of search content acquisition at MSN, said: "Given the copyright issues going on right now, it's a dicey time."

Google faces two lawsuits alleging it is violating copyright law by scanning and digitising all or parts of the collections at the libraries at universities such as Harvard, Michigan, Oxford and Stanford plus The New York Public Library. Last month, the Authors Guild filed suit against the search giant, and last week, the Association of American Publishers also sued.

Although Google says it will offer only a few sentences from books that are copyright-protected, unless the copyright holder gives permission to show more, the lawsuits allege that making copies by scanning the entire works violates the copyright law.

To avoid such problems, the Yahoo!-Internet Archive project, to be run by the Open Content Alliance, will digitise only texts in the public domain, except where the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The project will also make the index of digitised works searchable by any web search engine, unlike Google, which will be the only search engine for the books it digitises.

Tiedt said: "Principally and philosophically, we are aligning with the notion that intellectual property should not be proprietarily owned by any commercial company."

Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitisation of 150,000 books in the first year, which will be about $5m, assuming costs of about 10 cents per page and 300 pages, on average, per book, she said. Yahoo! has said it will pay for digitisation of 18,000 books, according to Tiedt.

Internet Archive, a not-for-profit organisation formed to offer access to historical collections that exist in digital format, will digitise the material.

Microsoft's MSN website will launch its MSN Book Search service next year and will experiment with different business models, such as pay per page, monthly subscriptions, selling e-books and advertisements, Tiedt said. She said: "The business model will change, depending on whether [the book] is out of copyright or in copyright."

MSN will offer more than the simple search of the books. For instance, the company may offer services such as allowing people to annotate works, create discussion groups and move text into productivity applications, Tiedt said.

Microsoft and Yahoo! may or may not share books with each other that have been digitised, she said. "We are working on global collections."

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com