Microsoft and British Library turn 100,000 books electronic

Microsoft has signed a deal with the British Library to digitise 100,000 of its books.

The software giant will use MSN Book Search to index 25 million pages of British Library content by next year, the pair announced.

The British Library confirmed its love of all things digital earlier this year, when it said it would make it a priority to update its infrastructure for the coming wave of digital content.

The library digitisation deal follows similar projects from the likes of Yahoo! and the Internet Archive, which Microsoft has recently become involved in, as well as Google's on-off Google Print scheme.

Google's digital library efforts have been dogged with controversy, with two separate copyright lawsuits filed against the search giant.

The British Library's initiative looks set to dodge the same legal wrangling by using out-of-copyright tomes.