HarperCollins Publishers has purchased an equity stake in NewsStand, a closely held web company with businesses that include LibreDigital, which is a digitizer, electronic warehouser, and distributor of books through the Web. For the past year, HarperCollins worked with LibreDigital to develop a system that permits the publisher to digitize a book from the earliest stages of development until it reaches the reader. HarperCollins digitized 12,000 of its own books and has put 2,000 of those online. The publisher has a catalog of about 20,000 older titles and publishes about 3,500 titles each year. Among other publishers that have made large digital investments are CBS Simon & Schuster, which is building its own digital warehouse and expects to have over 12,000 digital titles by the end of the year. Random House, a company of Bertelsmann, also started creation of a digital archive for its backlist and new published titles in the late 1990s. Bob Miller, president of Walt Disneys Hyperion, says he is in talks with Brian Murray of HarperCollins regarding the HarperCollins digital publishing service process that will occur when Hyperion moves distribution of books to HarperCollins. Groups of large publishers and authors have also filed suits against Google over the matter of whether Google has the right to digitally scan books under copyright, and to make them searchable, and to provide bits that can be viewed online.