World colossus Microsoft make it public on Nov. 4 that it had reached an agreement with the Britain Library to scan 100, 000 books of the library and put them on the Internet.

According to the agreement, Microsoft will invest US$2.5 million in this program and the digital versions of the books are expected to meet the readers next year. Readers can search online from the data of 25 million pages for free.

The two sides also expressed their willingness to expand the agreement.

The deal is regarded as a hard strike of Microsoft in its race against Google, which launched online library service on Nov. 3.

The British Library said, however, its agreement with Microsoft is not exclusive as the scanned data will be stored on the library's website, on which Google can search for free currently.

Before this, Yahoo, which had vied hard against Google in the American market, also targeted online library. Yahoo announced on Oct. 3 it had joined the online library alliance to offer technologies for Internet searching.

By People's Daily Online