The publisher, owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, is following the rival Random House in trying to wrest back control of its content from search engines intent on digitising copies of books.

HarperCollins will hire a technology company to help to digitise its current titles — it releases about 3,500 to 5,000 books a year worldwide — plus a further 20,000 to 30,000 backlist titles. The books would then be made available to search engines to index.

Brian Murray, the group president, said: “Google has been requesting physical copies of our books to make available for search. Amazon has followed and now both MSN and Yahoo! want to join in. That means there would be four sets of files out there — when it’s something the publisher should control.”

HarperCollins, publisher of The Chronicles of Narnia, wants to control its electronic rights. However, it remains open-minded as to how it might seek to make money from e-books. Jane Friedman, chief executive, said: “We have a vision for a company; the economic model will follow.”

This approach contrasts with Random House, owned by Bertlesmann of Germany, which said last month that it would introduce a “pay-per-page-view” model — charging four cents a page after offering the reader an initial sample of pages for free.

Underlying the moves by both companies to digitise their titles is an increasingly tense relationship between publishers and search engines. Both HarperCollins and Random House are strongly opposed to Google Library, an initiative by the search engine to digitise and index copyright material, which would make extracts available online.

In October, the Association of American Publishers launched a legal action against Google, alleging breach of copyright. That action is supported by HarperCollins and by Random House.

But the publishers are also keen to work with Google, Amazon and other search engines, so long as they have greater control over their content.

HarperCollins hopes to digitise its first books by the middle of next year, after selecting a technology partner by the middle of next month. Random House said that it was still in discussions about introducing pay-per-page-viewing.

“This is a work in progress. We’ve got a lot of compliments from fellow publishers about the ideas behind the business model,” said a spokesman for the publisher in New York.

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