MSN plans book-searching service in 2006

Microsoft's MSN division plans to digitize and index for search copies of books and other printed material, and is joining an industry coalition to help them with this strategy, the company will reveal Wednesday.

The move comes as competitor Google is embroiled in a legal battle with publishers and authors over its library project, a plan to digitize and make library books available for indexing and search.

Microsoft MSN Wednesday will unveil MSN Book Search, which by the first half of 2006 will provide the ability to search books that are not under copyright, said Danielle Tiedt, general manager for search content acquisition for MSN. She said books published before 1923 are not subject to copyright in the U.S.

MSN also is in talks with both libraries and publishers to have copyright books indexed and available for search sometime next year, presumably in the second half, she said.

Microsoft also Wednesday will announce plans to join the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group of companies that are building a digital archive of published materials that respect copyrights and will ensure no commercial company will own printed intellectual property, Tiedt said. Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo are among the companies in the OCA.

The OCA will be digitally scanning the published material Microsoft plans to make available through MSN Book Search, she said.

At this point Microsoft is not planning to charge for searches of noncopyright materials once they are available, but could implement for-fee value-added services around searches of the materials, such as collaborative services that allow users to share information they have found by performing searches, Tiedt said.

"For instance if you're viewing a page in the book, we can use the community assets through Messenger and Hotmail [to let users] talk about a page or a book online," she said.

The company plans to have a business model for copyright books, but is not sure at this time if searches of that material will be for a fee or free. That decision depends on whether there is enough interest from advertisers to support free searching of copyright materials, which is something Tiedt said she doubts.

"I personally don't believe [advertising] would be as effective as it would need to be to be the only business model," Tiedt said. "We're going to need to explore other business models to make it valuable for all parties along the value chain -- publishers, libraries, authors, search providers etc."

In December Google launched Google Print Library Project, a project to scan all or portions of the library collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library and Oxford University and make them searchable on Google.

So far, the Mountain View, California, search company has been hit with two lawsuits over the project -- one filed by the Association of American Publishers, and one filed by the Authors Guild and three individual writers -- because it planned to allow for searches of copyright material without seeking permission from the publishers of that material.

Google in August temporarily halted the scanning of in-copyright library books until Nov. 1 to give publishers an opportunity to let the company know which of their books they did and didn't want scanned.

Google also has a Google Print Publisher Program, in which it has deals with publishers to enable searches of copyright materials.