Microsoft is ending their book scanning efforts and will shut down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites. They would rather crawl this form of content rather than create it by scanning documents/books.

http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C40069388088257452005DF4BB.html?ref=technology

[Moved from Microsoft To Shut Down Book Search – Colin]

ccording to the Live Search Blog: "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."

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/23/book-search-winding-down.aspx

Well .. this leaves Google as the main search engine that still scans books ...