Microsoft hands Google the future of digital booksHere, have a monopoly
By Andrew Orlowski
Published Tuesday 27th May 2008
While Bill Gates now holds a lucrative monopoly on digital images, his successors don't see the same prosperous future for the digital word. Microsoft is withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitisation project and will cease to scan books, the company said on Friday. It's abandoning its Live Book Search venture - a curious decision, since it effectively hands the future of the book to arch-rival Google.
Why? Because the Open Content Alliance is out of money - and Microsoft was by far the biggest financial backer.
And another story from the same publication:
Failing Web 2.0 stars pray for copyright abolition
For this story link here.
1 comment:
Thanks for these Bookman. After reading the rather hackneyed digitoutopia rantings of the MacMillan digitalist this morning--we're all networked, reading along is dead, we'll do it all online (rather amusingly, her server then broke down!)--I find it very satisfying to read these posts: on Lessig's backing from google, on the lack of financial oomph in Web 2.0 without getting content for free, on Microsoft thinking digitizing all the books in the world may not be a smart business decision. Time to read a good old book now--or at least proof one.
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