In a belated response to the success of online booksellers in enticing customers to websites such as Amazon, two publishers have launched features that allow customers to browse through books online.
The facility “is today’s equivalent of picking up a book off a friend’s coffee table and glancing through it”, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of I Am Not Myself These Days, told trade journal the Book Standard.
On the sites of Random House and HarperCollins, readers can access front and back covers, title pages and the first few pages of the first two chapters. The experience, although undeniably technologically impressive, is slightly less engaging than picking up a book and leafing through it. The future of the coffee table, unlike that of traditional publishing, is probably assured for a few more years.
Readers can leaf through works by thousands of authors. Random House’s Insight feature will give access to the works of 5Â 000 of the company’s titles.
Both companies say the feature will soon allow readers to post book excerpts on their personal pages on social networking sites such as MySpace. HarperCollins is part of the News Corp empire owned by Rupert Murdoch. It also owns MySpace.
They still lag behind established online retailers, however. Amazon launched its book-browsing function in 2003 and Google has offered the feature since 2005.
Nevertheless the publishers are showing they can get to grips with the jargon of the online world.
“The Browse Inside widget is the most recent marketing tool we have developed using the capabilities of our digital warehouse to market our titles to the MySpace generation online,” Brian Murray, group president for HarperCollins, said in a statement. – Guardian Unlimited Â