MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
January 18 – January 25, 2007 Edition

HarperCollins Alliance

Offers Digital Services

To Other Publishers

NEW YORK, NY/1/18/07—HarperCollins has acquired a stake in NewsStand, Inc., the parent company of LibreDigital, a new digital content delivery and warehouse system that applies to books the same technology Newsstand employs for periodicals.

HarperCollins is already using Newsstand’s technology as its main digitizer. The company began creating a digital warehouse last year to keep better control of digital forms of its books. HC’s alliance with LibreDigital will now enable it to extend digital services to other publishers. HC had received many requests from other publishers to use their technology as a safer digital distribution option than allowing Google and Amazon to “look inside,” or in some cases to digitize entire copyrighted books. Google is embroiled in several lawsuits brought by publishers for what many consider to be unlawful digitizing of copyrighted materials.

The Harpercollins and LibreDigital alliance will offer publishers a broad range of services from digital typesetting, production and warehousing, to online marketing and distribution. The proprietary LibreDigital system includes sophisticated digital workflow and internet distribution tools.

Brian Murray, HC group president, will join the Newsstand, Inc. board to oversee HC’s investment.

While the DRM layer will ostensibly help publishers keep tabs on content and keep prompting people to buy the entire book, other features of the new warehouse system could help generate new revenue from slicing and dicing content.