Microsoft to Stop Scanning Books

Microsoft is getting out of the digital content building business. From The New York Times:

Microsoft appears to have decided that it doesn’t want to be in the business of creating digital content, instead hoping that others will take on that task. The company will give its scanning equipment to its library and digitization partners and encourage them to continue to scan books. “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Nadella wrote.

Microsoft has scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles during the life of the projects, he said. That material will still be available in Live search results, but not through separate indexes.

The NYT piece is here.