Live Search Books & Academic Bite the Dust

I've been pondering this on and off for a few days now: what will the long term effect be of Microsoft's cessation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic?  If you haven't read about this yet, it's big news in library circles.  Microsoft has nixed the brand new Live Search Books project (which was going to go into full production June 1) and stopped its Live Search Academic project.

My initial reaction is that this will feed the monopoly super-power that is Google.  Google's Book Search and Scholar, the only real competitors to Microsoft's projects, now stand alone in the marketplace.  Libraries and publishers who before had a choice now have to go with Google if they want mass digitization of their materials in an affordable way.  Microsoft wanted to make money, and online books were expensive to produce and weren't making money.  And yet, Google's projects are going strong.  I hope that  a non-corporate entity springs up to take up the slack and compete with Google's commercial model.  Let's hope.  Let's really, really hope.

If you want to read more in-depth analysis of this news, take a look at Barbara Quint's piece on the InfoToday site.