ks in May 2007, and one
million ebooks in December 2008.

Microsoft has been one of the partners of the OCA, while also
developing its own project. The beta version of Live Search
Books was released in December 2006, with a search possible by
keyword for non copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft in
partner libraries. The British Library and the libraries of the
universities of California and Toronto were the first ones to
join in, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public
Library and Cornell University. Books offered full text views
and could be downloaded in PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft
announced agreements with several publishers, including
Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill, for their books to
be available in Live Search Books. After digitizing 750,000
books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft ended
the Live Search Books program in May 2008, to focus on other
activities, and closed the website. These books are available
in the OCA collections of the Internet Archive.

A main issue for digital libraries is the lack of proofreading
of digitized books, that ensures a better accuracy of the text
without any loss from the print version. The only digital
library proofreading its books has been Project Gutenberg, with
28,000 high-quality ebooks available in January 2009. Good OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) software run on image files -
obtained from scanning print pages - is said to ensure 99%
accuracy. If the step of the proofreading seems essential to
Project Gutenberg, whose goal is to reach a 99.99% accuracy for
its ebooks - above the 99.95% accuracy set up as a standard for
Library of Congress -, this step is skipped by the Internet
Archive, the OCA, Google and many others. Some R&D teams work
on better quality OCR technology, which means that they would
have to go back to the original image files to provide a higher
quality book in the future, if they do want to provide digital
versions without any loss from the print version.

2007: WE READ ON VARIOUS ELECTRONIC DEVICES

= [Overview]

Amazon.com launched its own reading device, the Kindle, in
November 2007. In the mid-1990s, people read on their desktop
computers before reading on their laptops. The Palm Pilot was
launched in March 1996 as the first PDA, and people began
reading on PDAs. 23 million Palm Pilots were sold between 1996
and 2002. Its main competitors were the Pocket PC (launched by
Microsoft in A