Less than a month after Yahoo! threw its weight behind the Open Content Alliance, an attempt to create an open database of scanned public domain and copyrighted literature, Microsoft has also commited to pitching in. SEW is running an analysis of Microsoft's long-range plan here. The short-term effect in the increasingly heated competition in the book-search field, is to make Google seem even more isolated in its Google Print For Libraries litigation struggles and copyright approach. Microsoft reportedly will release some kind of consumer book-search program in the first half of 2006.
