Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Sad Books News

I regret to inform my readers that Live Search Books (and Microsoft's digitization project that went with it) has been aborted. This is a huge loss, as it was the closest competitor to Google Books. It had a better interface than its competitor and sometimes had content available that was not available via Google Books. It is really a loss for everyone who uses the Internet.

Let's hope that Google doesn't similarly pull the plug on Google Books.

-TurretinFan

4 comments:

Carrie said...

That stinks.

I read something a few months back about Google Books that made me worry they could either disappear or start charging for access. Since then, I have been trying to download PDFs as I can just in case.

Turretinfan said...

That is a good idea. It's bulky, but I try to do the same thing, as much as possible.

Ken Jr. said...

If you haven't yet educate yourself on the basics of copyright law and history in the US and England. The more people are aware of how different the current system of copyright is from the one that America's founders established the more likely it is that Congress will have enough pressure from the populace to oppose the interests of the copyright controllers. (a good book to start on this topic is Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig http://tinyurl.com/5r5wpm )

Ken Jr. said...

hmm, google books only allows limited previews of the book...check out this site for a copy that you are free to read entirely on or offline and distribute noncommercially: http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/