Microsoft Book Search

Microsoft’s new book search site Live Search Books is, well, live. It doesn’t work in the Safari browser, but it works fine in Firefox. I have only played around with it a bit, but I can already say that for those interested in doing historical research, the new Microsoft book search offers two major advantages over Google book search, despite the fact that the former only provides search results for books out of copyright (mostly before 1923).

I have at once lauded but also complained about severe flaws in Google’s book search in an earlier posting here at Muninn and also at a Frog in a Well posting. My two biggest complaints at this time are:

1) Not all books which are clearly out of copyright are fully viewable at Google search. Sometimes only partial view, or “snippet view” is available.
2) Though there is the wonderful feature of PDF download on Google book search for books that they recognize as out of copyright, once you download the book, you cannot search the document within your PDF viewer because Google does not supply the text layer for these documents.

Microsoft’s book search has neither of these problems as far as I can tell:

1) All of the books I have clicked on can be downloaded as a full PDF
2) The PDFs I have downloaded are fully searchable on the text layer.

This is wonderful news and I hope Google Books will respond accordingly. Microsoft book search still seems a bit rough around the edges and doesn’t have the nice new smooth scroll view that Google Books recently added, but I am very happy to see that there are two competing services in this area. I hope the Microsoft search will continue to add books, and also, hopefully, consider adding materials out of copyright for later periods when this can be determined.