First, HarperCollins followed the digital drumbeat at parent News Corp. by making plans to digitize its catalog; now it’s revamping its site and adding new features including a book sampling and a Digital Media Cafe.  Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins, told the NYT the company has invested several million dollars in digital and predicts a future cost in the “seven figures” annually. One feature that wasn’t added: retail. Instead, clicking on “buy this book” brings up a page of online retailers—including independents—with single-click shopping or links to find other online retailers and bookstores.
—“Browse Inside” launches in beta with 10 authors but plans call for larger scale. Clicking on the logo launches an application that calls up the pages digitized through NewsStand; it’s not a rapid process but it does make it easy to read several samples.  In the next year, the program is supposed to expand across HarperCollins. Eventually, “Browse Inside” will be available from authors’ sites, HarperCollins newsletters and booksellers’ retail sites. Simon & Schuster provides excerpts via SimonSays.com but not as actual pages from the book. Amazon.com shows sample pages and “as is” excerpts with its OnlineReader (which is a lot faster to load that HC’s version) but it’s more limited and it’s not part of the publishers environment.
—Digital Media Cafe offers paid and free audio and video. For instance, a Neil Gaiman interview is free; downloading Gaiman reading “The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish” is $2.99 but sampling it is free. An original short-format publishing program is in the works.