Live Search Books was a search service for books launched in December 2006, part of Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's Live Search range of services. Microsoft was working with a number of libraries, including the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

, to digitize books and make them searchable, and in the case of out-of-copyright books, available across the web.

Microsoft was running a Live Search Books Publisher Program (previouly referred to as Windows Live Publisher) to encourage book publishers to send their books to be scanned and indexed for the service.

In May 2008, Microsoft closed their Live Search Books and Live Search Academic services, those results integrated into regular Search and/or returned to their owners. The project had scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles.

Features

Live Search Books displayed in-copyright book contents from the following sources:

• Publishing partners including Academic Resources Corporation, Amherst Media, Bearport Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harrison House Publishers, Harvard University Press, Hazelden Publishing & Educational Services, Institute for International Economics, John Wiley & Sons Publishing, Lerner Publishing Group, MBI Publishing Company, McGraw-Hill Companies, Microsoft Corporation, MIT Press, OECD, Osprey Publishing, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, PREP Publishing, Rodale, Rutgers University Press, Simon & Schuster, Springer, SUNY Press, Taylor & Francis Group, The Perseus Books Group, The World Bank, University of Massachusetts Press, Wheatmark, Wilderness Press, World Health Organization, World Scientific Publishing Company, World Wisdom
  World Wisdom
  World Wisdom is an independent publishing company established in 1980 in Bloomington, Indiana. World Wisdom publishes religious and philosophical texts, including the work of authors such as Frithjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda K...
  
  , and Yale University Press
• Contents uploaded using Live Search Books Publisher Program

In addition to the normal search capabilities, Live Search Books also featured:

• Filter by the percentage of viewable contents
• Hit density map allowing users to see where the search results fall in a given title
• Preview window on the right displaying the title, author, cover image, summary, table of contents previews, hit density map, subject, publisher, published year, and ISBN
• Limited page previews with page preview counter restricting users to sign-in to their Windows Live ID
  Windows Live ID
  Windows Live ID is a single sign-on web service developed and provided by Microsoft that allows users to log in to many websites using one account...
  
   to view only the number of pages limited by the publisher
• Search keywords within the book
• Download the entire book in PDF format
• Book viewer allowing users to view full pages or zoomed in, flip through the book page by page, and link to the book's table of contents