With winter in full swing around most of the United States, outdoor activities are few and far between.  One of the best ways to spend a day stuck indoors is with a good book.  But if you're like me, you don't always think about having a book to read in advance.  It never fails.  So I end up having to brave the elements anyway.  But now I, and others like me, have one more option for finding great things to read without getting frostbite.

The Windows Live Search team announced earlier this week that its Live Search Books service was going public beta this week.

A check of the Live Search Books URL shows that the search is, in fact, up and running.  However, I couldn't find it listed on any of the Live Search beta pages.  Maybe I overlooked it.  Or maybe Microsoft is keeping it low-key for the time being.  That might not be a bad idea for now… since I couldn't get the service to work correctly.

It searches just fine.  The results are very clean and easy to read with title pages displayed next to bibliographical information on each book.  Clicking a title page takes you to the reading interface, which is also easy to understand and laid out fairly well.  But this is where the service starts to break down.  I couldn't get any of the controls to work.  A click on the forward and/or back buttons that should flip the pages does nothing.  Searching for words within the book returns a list of results… that don't work, either.  For the curious few, I'm using Internet Explorer 7.  Perhaps it works in other browsers.  Or perhaps some network setting here at the office is getting in the way (which isn't a good excuse anyway… Microsoft, of all companies, should take corporate networks into account when creating services).

For now, I'd stick with Google Book Search.  But I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Live Search Books.  It has great potential as an excellent source of reading material.  It has a good interface and very easy to use controls… I assume.

And while I've not forgotten that it's a beta product, if I were Microsoft I'd have waited until the service worked with my own flagship internet application before releasing even a beta.