London - The Random House Group, Bertelsmann's publishing arm, on Monday announced the launch of a new Web widget that lets consumers browse and search through selections of books. The customizable widget, which will appear on sites for book wholesalers Gardners and other sites, also lets consumers purchase books directly via a "Buy Now" button. Sites featuring the widget will contain the words "Open the Book" at the top of each book's cover art.

New York - Publisher Random House, a unit of Germany's Bertelsmann, has decided to forego digital rights management on its audiobooks and will begin selling them in the unprotected MP3 format, The Wall Street Journal reported. Authors who do not wish to participate may still have their audiobooks sold wrapped in DRM. Random House recently partnered with digital music store eMusic to test sales of DRM-free audiobooks, and found that none of its titles were pirated on file-sharing networks.

New York - Bertelsmann-owned publisher Random House has announced plans to begin selling individual chapters to select book titles online, for $2.99 each. The first title under the offering will be Chip Heath and Dan Heath's "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." Meanwhile, News Corp.'s HarperCollins is offering full access to certain titles, from authors including Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman, for a limited time in electronic format. The publisher is also offering access to limited previews of certain titles before they are published.

New York - Digital music retailer eMusic, the second-largest seller behind Apple's iTunes, announced on Monday that it has added over 1,000 downloadable audiobook titles in MP3 format to its catalog. Audiobooks from publishers including Blackstone Audio, Hachette, Naxos Audiobooks, Penguin and Random House will be available by subscription, for $9.99 per month for one book or $19.99 for two books. While the audiobook files will be delivered as MP3s, they will include watermarks for tracking where they end up. Some publishers are viewing the addition of their titles as a test. "We're very interested in testing this, but we didn't think it was appropriate to put all of our titles in a test program," Random House Audio publiser Madeline McIntosh told The New York Times. "If we see that piracy of our products is increasing, we would stop."

San Francisco - Online retail giant Amazon.com is set to introduce its own e-book reader device next month that can connect wirelessly with the company's online e-book store, The New York Times reported on Thursday.