The two companies have been in talks about Google’s book-scanning project according to Reuters. A Random House spokesman who was asked about a possible agreement said, "Random House continues to have periodic constructive conversations with Google on issues of mutual relevance."

Random House is a member of the American Association of Publishers and says it still supports a U.S. copyright case filed against Google in 2005 that is being funded by the association.

The suit comes from Penguin, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Simon & Schuster and asks to stop Google from scanning in copyright books it receives from its library partners without explicit permission from publishers.

Google has partnered with over 10,000 publishers who provide books to Google to be entirely scanned. Google make the books partially available to online readers under the agreements with each publisher.

Google has scanned the complete text of more than 1 million books. The total number of books in the world is not known, but WorldCat, a global library collective has 91 million bibliographic records in its database.

Several prominent libraries have already signed up to be a part of the Google Book Project, but the online search giant’s ambitions have some publishers turning up their nose in disapproval.

Both Random House and HarperCollins have stepped out in defiance of the book search initiatives of Google and others by announcing plans to implement their own proprietary technology that will allow prospective book buyers to peruse snippets from titles currently distributed by the respective publishing houses.

I guess they aren’t big fans of free publicity.

More on this story from Techdirt:

The question, really, is why bother? All these publishers are creating limited, expensive, fragmented searches for books, when Google (and others such as Yahoo and Amazon) are more than willing to do the work for them, while bringing all the offerings together. There are very, very few people in this world who think about books in terms of who published them.

No one wants to know that they need to go to a certain place to search for a Random House book and another for a HarperCollins book. Instead, let the search engines do the work (and spend the money), and the search engines will bring in the people and help drive sales. Building separate, fragmented book searches hardly seems like a compelling or cost-effective plan.

I really couldn’t have said it any better myself. The whole move seems almost prideful in a way. Do Random House and HarperCollins really believe that can manage this whole thing better than Google, a company that has built its entire brand on the backbone of the prowess of its search technology?

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