Microsoft launched Live Book Search beta version December 6, 2006. It returns key word queries on books that are no longer protected by copyright and integrates that information with other search content. Next year, it will include books that are currently under copyright protection as well. The “Search inside a book” feature allows users to review the full text of scanned books. Microsoft has restricted the beta release of Live Search Books to only include noncopyright books scanned from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto. The company plans to add books currently being scanned by robotic machines from the New York Public Library, Cornell University and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine within the next month. Microsoft will phase in the integration of book content into Microsoft’s general Windows Live Search, first with Instant Answers, and later into core search results.
The University of Pennsylvania lists on Online Books Page free access to over 25,000 English publications in various formats. Users may search by title and author as well as browse by author, title, subject, and serial.
Google Book Search reviews the full text of books to find ones that interest you and learn where to buy or borrow them, including access online. Clicking on a book search result enables you to see everything from a few short excerpts to the entire book.
AOL Books, NY Times Book Reviews, and other offer author interviews, book reviews and book excerpts.
Free online book searches change study patterns for students from K20, and probably of many professors, scholars, and scientists. (Yes, professors can be different from scholars.) While easy access to material is useful, and I’ll continue using it, I wonder what is lost by not walking through floors of library stacks in a major research library, scanning books along the shelves, sampling titles, and sitting on the floor to see what I had missed that other people knew before I found that publication.
Kudos, Microsoft for adding a bit of ease to academic studies. Actually, you raised the bar for adequate scholarly performance, since none of us can claim an excuse for having limited access to scholarly publications as some have tried to claim.
And thank you, universities of Viriginia and Pennsylvania for your free online ebook libraries. They have given me many pleasant hours of reading.