Microsoft plans to shutter its book-scanning operation next week, the company said on Friday. It will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .

Microsoft appears to have decided that it doesn't want to be in the business of creating digital content, instead hoping that others will take on that task. The company will give its scanning equipment to its library and digitization partners and encourage them to continue to scan books. "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," Nadella wrote.