The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins are letting customers browse books online.

Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.

HarperCollins Publishers, whose authors include Michael Crichton, on Monday said it was introducing a browse function that lets consumers embed pages of books onto networking sites such as MySpace.