The Wall St. Journal reports that HarperCollins will scan its books and allow search services to index those scans while itself controlling the full-text in digital form: HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books
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.”
