Microsoft Adds Books.Live.com Beta

Almost two months ago, I posted in "Microsoft's View of "My Town" about Microsoft partnering with a local company, Kirtas Technologies, to be part of Microsoft's Live Book. I discovered from a report in ITWire that Microsoft's Live Book search, books.live.com, has been released in Beta form.

As reported by ITWire:

"Live Search Books (books.live.com) is initially restricted to only include non-copyright books scanned from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto. Partnerships with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine have also been announced.

Live Search Books' "Search inside a book" feature allows users to search the full texts of scanned books. Copyrighted books will be added to the collection later, but only those submitted to Microsoft by publishers or authors."

Of course I had to go try it out. I placed "Little Women" "Louisa May Alcott" in the search field and received 39 search results. Thirty-nine is not a difficult number to tread through but as books are added to the on-line inventory, advanced search capabilities need to be available. Is a catalog of titles and authors being created? I would have liked to scan such a catalog.

In my search, "Little Women" was not returned in the search results, but there were other books by Louisa May Alcott that I could download to read.