Microsoft Scans British Library

Seems to be a heavy digital books day: About 100,000 out-of-copyright books in the British Library are going to be scanned and put online by Microsoft. They will be digitised from 2006 and put online as part of Microsoft’s book search service next year.

FT: Once digitised, the material will be made available on the British Library and MSN websites. Both organizations insisted that other companies would not be blocked from using the Library’s content.

Details on how Microsoft would commercially exploit the material were sketchy. Alistair Baker, managing director of Microsoft in EMEA said the company still had to decide whether some of the content would be charged for or whether it would simply help to drive web-traffic and therefore ad sales.

FT II: Microsoft said it would invest $2.5m in the venture next year as “an initial investment”. While the early “pilot” phase will aim to process 10,000 books, the company made clear that it saw its involvement with the British Library as a long-term project.

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