WSJ.com - HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books

Like water that will flow downhill, the digital book age is coming. In the WSJ (subscription required), it is reported that HarperCollins will host its own books. Google, Yahoo and others will be allowed to index.

Google has never expected to host the entire world's content. Google only wants to make the worlds content available to those who seek it.

Google TO BUY 1 BILLION SUNW COMPUTERS!

Not really. I made the above headline up. It will probably happen but it has not been announced. Sun has introduced a computer that consumes substantially less electricity. Google has publicly suggested that they are looking for more efficient machines. Google's second largest expense is the power to run its data centers.

The reason for the headline and the discussion here is that it all ties into the fact that HarperCollins plans to host 20,000 titles online. These 20,000 titles are a drop in a big bucket. The amount of storage and the number of servers needed over the next ten years is mind boggling.

Google purchased Storage Technology because it has a vision of the internet; the vision is one huge computer network. As I continue to add new Googlefeatures to my own desktop, I have noticed that I am using more and more off site storage and offsite computing power.

MORE TO COME! Expect the next 10 years to be a software and hardware boom!