"Microsoft said Friday that it was ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web, a sign that it is retrenching in some areas of Internet search in the face of competition from Google, the industry leader." See "Microsoft Will Shut Down Book Search Program," by MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times, 5/24/08.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/technology/24soft.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&...
Microsoft was partially funding the Internet Archive but Brewster Kahle says they have enough money "...for a while ... and [e]ventually funding will come from the public sphere" U of Toronto and other libraries plan to continue with the project.
And this from Techdirt, the Insight Company for the information age -- "... Microsoft ... is handing over the scanning systems it put together to its various library partners and hoping they'll continue scanning on their own, saying: 'Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.'" http://techdirt.com/articles/20080523/1402111214.shtml