Publishers Debut Search Engines

What, however, does it mean to consumers and Web 2.0 readers?

By Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 4/1/2007

For years, publishers have talked openly about making their own content available online, and now Random House and HarperCollins plan to offer thousands of digital books. Both Random House’s Insight service and HarperCollins’s Browse Inside tout the ability to search within texts and even link to passages from books, personal blogs, MySpace pages, and web sites from their own sites.

HarperCollins’s Jane Friedman said the ventures were an effort to “reach consumers wherever they are” and to “fulfill consumer and marketplace demands while, first and foremost, protecting our authors’ copyrights.” The latter is a not-so-veiled swipe at Google, which is currently scanning and indexing books amid the backdrop of a lawsuit by some publishers to stop the activity.

Still, the digital efforts have confused observers. On the popular Techdirt web site, one commentator wrote, “There are very, very few people in this world who think about books in terms of who published them.”

Ray Cha of the Institute for the Future of the Book called it “a small step in the correct direction” but observed that publishers don’t seem “ready to release control they traditionally held and reinterpret their purpose.”