Microsoft has teamed up with the British Library to provide free access to its vast store of books via Microsoft's search engine.

The British Library holds 18m different books but Microsoft's initial service, called Live Search Books (http://books.live.com), has started with non-copyrighted volumes totalling 25m pages of text. This includes all the great classics of English literature.

Microsoft is also seeking the permission of authors of many copyrighted works which it wants to include on its search engine. It hopes to include specialist texts in fields such as medicine. The search service will soon also include books held by the New York Public Library, the University of California and Cornel University.

The British Library has spent many months scanning millions of pages of its books and believes the new service will transform research in all kinds of fields.

British Library chief executive Lynne Brindley told The Business: "This partnership helps us fulfill our vision of promoting ready access to our collection for everyone who wants to use it. It offers unparalleled access to our vast collections to people all over the world: the items scanned will be available to anyone, anywhere and at any time."

The free books service is the latest move by Microsoft to lure users away from its rival Google. Currently Google offers a search service which includes books copied from the libraries of universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Virginia in America, Oxford in Britain and the Complutense University of Madrid. The search engine giant is also involved in a pilot project with the Library of Congress.

Microsoft's service has one crucial difference from that offered by Google. It has made sure that its Live Search Books does not provide access to copyrighted material which doesn't have the owner's permission. Google is currently taking flak from critics, publishers and authors who claim that it has scanned and made publicly available a number of copyrighted books without approval.

In a lawsuit the French Publishers' Association, which represents 400 French book publishers, accused Google of digitising a number of protected works and allowing access to extracts of these works. Google claims it only allows access to certain extracts of the copyrighted material, and it denies that it is infringing European copyright law.

The French Publishers' Association's members have also been angered at the way the extracts are displayed on Google's search engine; these are shown graphically as ragged pieces of paper as if torn from books. The French publishers say this is disrespectful and conveys a strong suggestion that they are disposable.