BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft debuts book search tool — FYI.
Anyone wanting to view an obscure tome from the vaults of the British Library will be able to look for it online from Thursday.
Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google’s Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US. The digital archive will include books from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto. Books from three other institutions will be added in January 2007.
All the books currently included in the project will be non-copyrighted but later it will also add copyrighted work that publishers have given permission to include in the project.
While the link doesn’t seem to be on the main MSN search page, here it is. Click here.
me too! me too!
You know what would be really cool?
Do you, do you?!!!?
If Microsoft actually invented something NEW!
That’s right, they invent something nobody ever thought of, or wrote about.
Let’s see, they did the GUI (Xerox/Apple), Excel (Lotus), Word (WordPerfect, Bank Street Writer, etc.), Mouse (Mac), MSN Search (Infoseek, Google), Keyboards and Mice (pick somebody), web-page editor and browsers, Virtual PC (VMWare), and so on…
Microsoft’s ability to innovate is limited to what they emulate.
However, as I sometimes remind people: Microsoft isn’t a software or hardware company, they’re a marketing company.
I wonder if the books will be DRMed?
#1 – You beat me to it… 🙂
Curiously the site is also rather buggy.
#2…. What’s wrong with being a marketing company?
What’s wrong with being a marketing company?
Nothing, as long as you don’t pretend to be something else. 🙂
John,
It would be “curious” if it were NOT buggy!
If it could read out loud too, it may get me back into books.
Hey one of the coolest parts of being able to search the non-copyrighted books of the British Library is it is one of the largest collections of Occult books in the world!
Some people are superstitious enough to believe a book volume (the literal book,) can somehow be sacred or profane. This search tool can safely put this arcane knowledge in the hands of humanity.
It is the knowledge disseminated that makes the portability of wisdom a threat to institutions entrenched in self aggrandizing rhetoric and dogma.
But you know dumb ideas are just as portable as good ideas so it will always be important to have a sense of context; a virtual tree, fear of a virtual tree, a tree of knowledge, a tree of wisdom and understanding, a forest for the trees..
2. Geez, get a life already.
It seems that they used OCR scanning to create the database.
Search for ‘sony’ and you’ll get 158 results, the vast majority of which are from prior to Sony’s founding in 1946! (In fact, Sony came into being as a trademark in 1955 and Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo changed its’ name to Sony Corporation in 1958, but who’s quibbling …).
There are spelling and typo errors everywhere. GIGO.