Microsoft goes on bookish offensive

It took a while for the music companies to cotton on to the fact that digitised music was one of the few products that could fired about on the web. The porn industry was far more savvy in this regard. The musos had to resort to strong-arm tactics in order to claw back some of the market they might have jumped upon had they not been too coked up to appreciate it in the first place. These tactics served to alienate their audience perfectly and now it's Apple that takes a tasty margin.

Literature is a web-friendly product too. It's only text, after all. And so Microsoft and Google are engaged in a battle to own literature online.

The Vole announced yesterday that it had received the blessing of a bunch of publishers to rifle through online books with its search algorithms. In this, it trumpets its legitimacy compared with its un-evil rival. Google has been slipping the pages of published books under its OCR machine for a while now so that the content can be filleted by its remarkable searching technology. It's done so without asking publishers' permission, Microsoft points out.

So now the Vole says it will put its legit content up on its Live thingummyjig, where it says punters can search away and will be informed how many pages they're allowed to view as they search.

Google previously got in a spat with libraries in which it subpoenaed Microsoft and Yahoo to back up its claim that it as a master of the online universe should be able to put literature online if it felt like it.

Without much doubt the heavyweight pair envisage a world where they publish mankind's oeuvre in digital form and earn a tasty sum from the deal.

See Alos
Google seeks aid from Microsoft, Yahoo in library spat