HarperCollins Takes Digital Control

In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country's biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files. News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.

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"Now is the time to build a digital infrastructure that will allow us to protect our rights and the rights of our authors," said Jane Friedman, chief executive of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers. "We will make all of our books available digitally, but we will store the digital copies and license them out to those who want to use them." "We didn't like being seen as Luddites," she added. "We see what's going on, and we get it. We want to be the best collaborator, but we also want to take charge of our future."

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."