What exactly is the Internet Archive? Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California, the Internet Archive is a non- profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer permanent access to historical collections in digital format for researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web has been stored every two months or so since 1996, and has been freely available through the Wayback Machine since October 2001. As "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge", the Internet Archive has also become a digital library of text, audio, software, image and video content.
As explained in 2007 on the OCA website, OCA "is a collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. An archive of contributed material is available on the Internet Archive website and through Yahoo! and other search engines and sites. The OCA encourages access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors."
Unlike Google Books, OCA books are searchable and downloadable through any web search engine, and don't include copyrighted books, unless the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media, and the Prelinger Archives.
In 2006, Microsoft, while being one of the OCA partners, began developing its own digital library. The beta version of Microsoft Live Search Books was released in December 2006, with a collection of non copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft in partner libraries. The first partner libraries were the British Library and the libraries of the Universities of California and Toronto, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public Library and Cornell University Library. Books offered full text views, with a search by keyword, and could be downloaded as PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements with several publishers, for example 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 and closed the website. All the digitized books were transferred into the OCA collection of the Internet Archive.