Yeah, it is all confusing, but this will all take a couple of years to at least start making some sense. News Corp.‘s HarperCollins, one of the biggest book publishers, has decided to kickstart its own digital book strategy. It will digitize its active backlist of an estimated 20,000 titles and as many as 3,500 new books each year, and store them on its own servers, and then let the search engine spider them.

This is the opposite of what it does now: send copies of its books to various Internet companies for digitizing. The company figures that the present way lets the search companies own the customer, but by hosting and letting search sites end over customers to its own site would help them define the business model.