HarperCollins, Random House experimenting with online book-browsing—including ways to add titles to your site
So, gang, what do you think about the pros and cons? Browsing means better shopping, but, look, I want to own e-books for real.
That counts even more than social networking-related features or tie-ins. So let’s hope that the E-Book Museum approach won’t replace downloadable files.
Reuters has the details about the Random House and HarperCollins experiments with browsing:
Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.
Random House is also introducing a tool allowing users to add material from titles to personal pages on social networks such as MySpace or to a retailer’s Web site…
HarperCollins Publishers, whose authors include Michael Crichton, on Monday said it was introducing a browse function that lets consumers embed pages of books onto networking sites such as MySpace….
I couldn’t get the RH feature working when I tried it just now on the TeleBlog. Could the book-browser have been there, but invisible to me for want of the latest Flash? Or are there other problems, maybe WordPress-related?
Related news: Via Google.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Just from the look&feel it seems like they’re using Adobe digital edition.
Pretty good stuff from a publisher.
Of course a CreativeCommons licensed ebook can be passed around even more freely.
Still… looks to me that they’re fighting the inevitable.
February 27th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I surmise that HarperCollins is using technology developed by LibreDigital.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:31 am
When I had a look, it seemed to indicate to me some sort of flash thing? If so, that I don’t get. Admittedly I didn’t spend much time, but they want you to put a flash thing of a book on your blog or something?