Washington Post says Microsoft to offer 100,000 books free online

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I talked with some members of our content acquisition group on Friday. The Washington Post today had an article on their efforts. The BBC has another (we made a deal last week to scan 100,000 books in the British Library).

Why is this significant? Because we are offering libraries and publishers much better terms than our competitors are offering. For one, they get to keep a copy of every scan we do for their own purposes. But there are other differences too between our efforts and those of some of our competitors.

What is so interesting about scanning books? Well, we have a bunch of things we’re thinking of doing with those books. For one, it makes our Tablet PC much more attractive. Reading a book on a Tablet is WAY better than reading on a horizontal screen. For two, we have some ideas on how to make searching that knowledge base much better.

It’s about thrilling audiences. The company that makes great content available in the best way will build an audience. Where you find audiences you’ll find advertising. Our business is in a race with other businesses to build audience-thrilling experiences.

Our efforts here sure are making for strange bedfellows, though. We’re supporting the Open Content Alliance, which is setup by Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive. Now THAT is interesting! Why? Because the Internet Archive already houses the entire Grateful Dead library (among a lot of other things) for free! And, is a place that many video bloggers host their files. Again, for free! Brewster made a bunch of money off of his sale of Alexa to Amazon and is donating machines and bandwidth to the community for free.

I hope Microsoft continues supporting Brewster’s efforts. I think what he’s doing is hyper important to the long-term health of the Web. If you haven’t checked out the Internet Archive, you should. I hope I get to meet Brewster someday and thank him for what he’s done.

Published by Robert Scoble

I help entrepreneurs build their technology business' story, help with getting ready for investors, with other launch plans, and many other strategic things that can help your new startup. Call to talk: +1-425-205-1921 (text first).

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10 thoughts on “Washington Post says Microsoft to offer 100,000 books free online”

  3. Funny, in that they never did this back in 1998 when they talked about it, takes Google to get them to move. Good deal, except what format will it BE in? Your PDF replacement? Phsaw. LIT…MS Reader? (but that’s a dead-product). Graphic Images? Page images scanning is hardly a pure Project Guntenberg, they going to OCR too? Maybe this will kick MS Reader back to life? Return of SGML? It’s about thrilling audiences? Bull. It’s about making sure Google doesn’t get a hand-up.

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  4. Funny, in that they never did this back in 1998 when they talked about it, takes Google to get them to move. Good deal, except what format will it BE in? Your PDF replacement? Phsaw. LIT…MS Reader? (but that’s a dead-product). Graphic Images? Page images scanning is hardly a pure Project Guntenberg, they going to OCR too? Maybe this will kick MS Reader back to life? Return of SGML? It’s about thrilling audiences? Bull. It’s about making sure Google doesn’t get a hand-up.

    Like

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  6. Pingback: Pale Musings » Microsoft to offer 100,000 books free online

  7. “… they get to keep a copy of every scan we do for their own purposes.”
    Should we keep a straight face?????
    I want the same drink Scoble is having. Oops. *Not* the kool-aid.

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  8. “… they get to keep a copy of every scan we do for their own purposes.”
    Should we keep a straight face?????
    I want the same drink Scoble is having. Oops. *Not* the kool-aid.

    Like

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