Fridays are notorious as a dumping ground of bad news, Fridays before US holiday weekends being even more attractive for that purpose. So when Microsoft dropped the news that it was canceling Live Book Search and pulling out of the Open Content Alliance, the timing of the announcement suggested that the company didn't necessarily see this as good corporate PR. But Brewster Kahle, who heads the Internet Archive and is taking a lead role with the OCA, says that it's the right move for Microsoft. Despite coming to the end of $10 million in book scanning funds from the company, and despite getting only a couple days notice about the decision, Kahle says that his bottom line response to Microsoft's involvement in the digitization process is, "Thank you."

Satya Nadella, a Microsoft senior vice president, issued the bad news in a blog post on Friday morning. Live Book Search provided access to the huge collection of material scanned by the OCA, but Microsoft decided that this was not a sustainable long-term business. Instead, the idea was to dismantle Live Book Search and integrate all book search queries directly into the main Live search engine. While this would expose book search results to more users, it would also mean that Microsoft realized that its search team needed to focus its expertise on search, not content acquisition and storage. In other words, the Microsoft search team was moving back to becoming a navigation system rather than a content host.

"Based on our experience," wrote Nadella, "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."

One of the biggest of these repositories, apart from Google's book search project, is the OCA, where Microsoft has been a member for several years and has helped to fund the scanning of 1,000 books a day at thirteen major libraries. The Internet Archive is taking the lead on the project and provides hosting for the resulting texts, but Kahle isn't upset that a company like Microsoft has chosen to leave the work of scanning to libraries and foundations now.



Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

The loss of resources is "significant," he tells Ars, but "if we can't pick it up from here," then the OCA deserves to falter. Microsoft and other corporations like Yahoo have gotten the project off the ground by providing the initial scanning stations and developing the expertise needed to do the project right. While Microsoft is taking its cash with it, the company is leaving in place all the equipment that it paid for and is releasing all scans of public domain works for any use, not just education and research. According to Kahle, Microsoft has done more than it is contractually obligated to do as it ramps down its involvement with OCA.

In a way, Kahle sees the retreat of the corporations from OCA as a necessary step, perhaps even a good one. He's a firm believer in the idea that corporations should not be the entities we trust to provide access to important cultural data stores. If people think that corporations are the right way to access the history of human discourse, Kahle says they're in for "a series of very rude shocks." (The University of Michiagn, which has thrown in its lot with Google, does not agree.)

Libraries, foundations, and groups like the Internet Archive are arguably more interested in offering truly open access to resources, but without major funding from companies like Microsoft, will such projects remain viable in the long term? Kahle acknowledges that he needs to "scurry" to keep the library scanning centers operational; after all, several hundred people currently spend their days scanning books in these thirteen locations and they need to be "treated right."

But several months remain to figure out the financial details. For now, Kahle just wants to say thanks. "In the long term," he says, "it makes more sense this way."