HarperCollins has snagged bragging rights as the first publisher to actually pull off what’s been promised for many a moon – the online sampling of books. Thanks to last week’s launch of HC’s ‘Browse Inside’ program, readers can now do just that.
No plans are yet in the works to include ads with the free program. But the publisher has been experimenting with embedding ads on book sites. The first such initiative rolled out in February on behalf of Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson. With Google and Yahoo doing the indexing, the entire text of the business tome was put online with ads appearing on each of more than 200 web pages.
Plans are underway to roll out the program on a larger scale, extending the application to all books globally over the next year. As the program expands, consumers will be able to browse page views directly from author sites, HC’s newsletters and booksellers’ retail websites. In another first, HarperCollins has launched a Digital Media Café that will provide rich audio and video content, free and paid, for sampling, streaming and download to portable digital players.
