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Microsoft, Yahoo join Open Content Alliance, to digitize books
SAN FRANCISCO - Inspired by the Google Library project and recognizing the endless possibilities associated with it, Microsoft has joined a Yahoo-backed effort to digitize all the books in the world and make them accessible anytime on the Internet.
Redmond will be hoping that its backing would receive a less hostile response than Google has with publishers as well as authors questioning the search behemoth's right to go ahead with the project.
Microsoft has said that it would commission 150,000 books in the first year, which will cost about $5 million. Microsoft also announced plans to join Open Content Alliance (OCA), a group of companies that are planning on building a digital archive of books that will have no copyright issues or commercial conflicts associated with them.
The Yahoo-Internet Archive project will also make sure that only those books that are in the public domain are archived and that they do not face the same hurdles that Google is currently facing.
However, last week, the Mountain View, Calif-based Company said that the Google Print project was crucial to its plans, "We think you should be able to search through every word of every book ever written, and come away with a list of relevant books to buy or find at your local library. We aim to make that happen, but to do so we'll need to build and maintain an index containing all this information," said Google's general counsel David Drummond.
Meanwhile, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Virginia, and the University of Pittsburgh have already joined the OCA project. "If we go and bring universal access to all human knowledge it will be remembered as one of the great things humankind has ever done," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Microsoft said that it has begun negotiating with publishers and authors so that even copyright protected books are made available online.
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Written
by :
Kavindra Rani | Published on :
05:18:00
EST
Thu, 27 Oct 2005 |
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