BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft scans British Library:


About 100,000 books in the British Library are going to be scanned and put online by software giant Microsoft.
The books, which are out of copyright, will be digitised from 2006 and put online as part of Microsoft's book search service next year.

Microsoft is already working with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, to put an initial 150,000 works online.

A separate global digital library plan by Google is also under way.

The search giant is spending $200m (£110m) to create a digital archive of millions of books from four top US libraries. It is also digitising out-of-copyright books from the UK's Oxford University.