Microsoft's Live Search Books in United Kingdom - has it disappeared?
For some time I've been comparing Google's Book Search and Microsoft's Live Book Search (Amazon Reader is another place where one can preview some books; it's primarily available on their USA site, Amazon.com , though it only really applies to recent books that publishers have chosen to allow Amazon to show in digital form).
Now, it seems, Google's and Microsoft's programmes are effectively disappearing for UK users. Already for some months Google has reduced virtually everything printed after 1850 to Snippet View only (this date is only an approximation, some books pre-1850 are in snippet view and some post-1850 are in full view). This is because in the UK copyright is (generally) for 70 years after an author's death. So, suppose an author was 20 in 1850 and lived to be 100. He would have lived till 1930 and copyright would not expire till 2000. On the other hand MOST books that old are long out of copyright so it's a real pain that Google are working on that basis.
Just in the last few days it seems that Live Search Books has disappeared altogether as seen from our computers here, whether using Firefox or Internet Explorer; exactly what happens between the two browsers is sometimes slightly different, but neither browser leads me to a list of scanned books any more. Interestingly some of the items I used to view on Live Search Books were downloadable from www.archive.org, so that is one option that is still open to us here in UK.
I've been unable to find out anything about the disappearance of MSN Live Book Search by searching the web, so I thought I'd blog about it and see if anyone else had any information. Incidentally, there's a picture of what it used to look like at Phil Bradley's Weblog .
