January: PC Pro talks about Microsoft being the 'partner' digitising the entire 19th Century stock of the British Library – "Microsoft and Google have both been digitising books from US libraries and adding them to their rival online services for some time, and the British Library opted to partner with the former. Choosing Microsoft as a partner for any archiving project brings not only a wealth of experience and financial clout, but also a degree of controversy…"

May: Microsoft abandons the entire 'Live Search Books' project (and 'Live Search Academic'). But hey, they will start to "offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers", i.e. split ad revenue. If you're in the US.