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Books in Print to provide data for Microsoft project Print Email
Wednesday, 17 January 2007 07:00 PM America/New_York

Bowker's Global Books in Print (GBIP) database has been selected by Microsoft to provide the basic and value-added data that will enhance descriptions of books incorporated in the software giant's new Live Search Books (LSB) search service.

LSB is part of an ambitious project by Microsoft to scan millions of books and index them for online searching. The search engine allows users to search the full texts of scanned books and is currently restricted to out-of-copyright books scanned from the collections of leading libraries.

GBIP provides complete bibliographic details on more than 14 million books that are organized in its global database according to 30 powerful criteria.

“We're delighted that Microsoft selected us to be their content partner for this important project and look forward to working with them to provide objective data that enhances the rich information they will be delivering to users of the Live Search Books search service,” said Angela D'Agostino, vice president of marketing and business development at Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information management.

“Bowker's overall mission is to integrate our data into everyday work flow tools. We're very excited about Microsoft's vision of integrating search more fully into the end user's day-to-day work flow and are pleased that our data will play an integral part in the execution of that strategy.”

As part of the content licensing agreement with Microsoft, Bowker is also making available its “Publisher Authority” database, which contains company and contact information for more than 200,000 publishers worldwide, and a wide range of other value-added data modules that offer detailed descriptions of books, author biographies, award citations, book review citations, cover images, tables of contents and lists of best-sellers dating back to 1920.