Microsoft widens bookish offensive

THERE'S MORE Microsoft and Google chattering afoot with our Volish Overlords announcing a collaboration with the scanning specialists over at Kirtas Technologies, reports The Guardian.

Microsoft's agreement with Kirtas Technologies will help it to go ahead with its Live Book Search, which pretty much does what it says on the tin. The search will allow users to look for out of copyright intellectual wossits mainly from universities and such like, as well as copyrighted books sent to Vole Central via publishers or authors which will be scanned for free.

Google had last year announced plans for digitising a whole bunch of text from bigwig US scholarly safehouses, including the libraries of Harvard University. Google's project is running into some trouble, though, currently being sued by the Authors Guild for copyright violation.

Kirtas has the world's fastest robotic scanner, capable of 2,400 pages to be scanned and stored per hour, with an error rate lower than 1 per 10,000 pages, it is claimed.

A fair few university libraries have signed up for Microsoft's book search so far, including the University of California and the University of Toronto.

CEO of Kirtas Technologies, Dr Lofti Belkhir, is absolutely chuffed about the deal. "We are delighted by this partnership with Microsoft to free hundreds of years of knowledge," he says. A Lofti statement indeed. Ahem. µ

L'INQ
European librarians march against Google
Yahoo counters Google with book copying scheme
Google seeks aid from Microsoft, Yahoo in library spat