Microsoft Ends Live Search Books

Microsoft issued the following statement May 23:

To our current Live Search Books Publisher Program Partners:
As we hope you have already learned from us directly, we are ending the Live Search Books Publisher Program, including our digitization initiatives, and closing the Live Search Books site. We recognize that this is disappointing news to you, our partners, and to the users of the Live Search Books service. Ending these programs is the result of a strategic decision on our part to focus our investments in new vertical search areas where we believe we can more effectively differentiate Live Search.
Given the evolution of the web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday, we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, 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. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.
As we wind down Live Search Books we will be reaching out to you in partnership with Ingram Digital Group with information on new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help you derive ongoing benefits from your participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program. As part of this initiative, we intend to make the scan files we created from your print book submissions available to you for free. Please check back here next week for more information on these offers.
We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience that this decision has caused. You can read more about this announcement on the Live Search blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/)
Sincerely,
The Live Search Books Team