搜索、门户和广告部门高级副总裁 Satya Nadella 日前在 Blog 上宣布，微软将关闭 Live Search Books 服务：

"Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users."

微软的这款服务的数据库中，已经数字化了 75 万册书籍、8000 万份期刊文章，一度成为 Google 同类服务的有力对手。这一领域内的人士都应该很明白，这是一项很烧钱的玩意儿，在没有更多利益价值交换的可能性下，微软的此举还是可以理解的。以下还有一份致合作伙伴的邮件：

Dear Live Search Books Publisher Program Partner,

We are writing today to inform you that we are ending the Live Search Books Publisher Program, including our digitization initiative, and closing the Live Search Books site. We recognize that this is disappointing news to you and to the users of the Live Search Books service. Ending the Live Search Books program is the result of a strategic decision on our part to focus our investments in new vertical search areas where we believe we can more effectively differentiate Live Search.

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 search engines, consumers, and content partners. For example, this past Wednesday, we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.

With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make
book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower
costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of theindustry and evaluate future opportunities.

As we wind down Live Search Books we will be reaching out to you in partnership with Ingram Digital Group with information on new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help you derive ongoing benefits from your participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program. As part of this initiative, we will be making the scan files we created from your print book submissions available to you for free. We will follow-up next week with more information on these offers.

The Live Search Books Publisher Program site (http://publisher.live.com) will be taken down immediately. The Live Search Books site (http://books.live.com) will be taken down next week.

We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience that this decision has caused. You can read more about this announcement on The Live Search blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch).

Sincerely,

The Live Search Books Team

books@microsoft.com