Over the past couple of weeks Random House and Harper Collins have released web-based apps/widgets that are allowing folks to do some pretty cool things.

They both are offering ways for you to embed “Browse Inside” and “Search Inside” features of books into your own blog. If you’ve ever used Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature then you get the idea.

I haven’t put these new offering through their paces yet, but I have to say that I’m pretty excited.

Here’s a blog maintained by a developer of the Random House widget, but I have to admit he does a good job of offering reviews/links from both sides.

There’s plenty of talk of “the end of the book” and all that. I don’t buy it. But folks in the book biz better get on board with these new ways to “repurpose” “realign” and deliver content in “chunks” if they want to keep their head above water. Either way, these new tools are cool!