Publishers Stand Up to Google: HarperCollins Will Digitize Its Own Books

The Wall Street Journal reported today that HarperCollins Publishers Inc., one of the country's largest publishers, plans to create digital copies of its book library and make them scannable by search engines, such as Google, for a price. According to the WSJ, "Instead of sending copies of its books to various Internet companies for digitizing, as it does now, HarperCollins will create a digital file of books in its own digital warehouse. Search companies such as Google will then be allowed to create an index of each book's content so that when consumers do a search, they'll be pointed to a page view. However, that view will be hosted by a server in the HarperCollins digital warehouse. "The difference is that the digital files will be on our servers," said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins Publishers. "The search companies will be allowed to come, crawl our Web site, and create an index that they can take away, but not the image of the page." This would prevent such Internet companies from selling a digital copy of that book unless HarperCollins decided to partner with them as a retailer. "We'll own the file, and we'll control the terms of any sale," he added." Finally, publishers are starting to wake up and do what they could've been doing all along.