Academic and Book search, RIP

I was both surprised and sad to hear that Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects are being canceled. It was a pleasure and honor to be a part of the team that delivered both sites.

Here's the original announcement as posted on the Live Search team blog:

Book search winding down

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books
and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken
down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be
integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

This also means that we are winding down our
digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our
in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as
disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic
communities, and Live Search users.

Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we
believe the next generation of search is about the development of an
underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer,
and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our
strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as
travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our
advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we
digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. 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. With our investments, the
technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs
for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize
book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry
and evaluate future opportunities. 

As we wind down Live Search Books, we are reaching out to
participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to
build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive,
CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users
and search engines. 

In partnership with Ingram Digital Group, we are
also reaching out to participating publishers with information about
new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help them derive
ongoing benefits from their participation in the Live Search Books
Publisher Program.  

We have learned a tremendous amount from our
experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a
catalyst for more sustainable strategies. To that end, we intend to
provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are
also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized
library content and making the scanning equipment available to our
digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.
We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.

Satya Nadella
Senior vice president search, portal and advertising

https://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx