Microsoft Gives Up Digitizing of Libraries

After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft announced that scanning libraries and making its contents searchable is not anymore within its company’s plan for search.

The company will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals and will direct web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites.

“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,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for search, portal and advertising, said.

The move, however, is seen as an indication of Microsoft being choosy from hereon on the fights that it will take on its competitor Google.