• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 31, 2006

This morning Harold McGraw, III, president, chairman and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, reiterated his complaints about Google's plan to digitize library books and make them searchable online.

"Google is seeking to increase its customer base and own profits," McGraw told several hundred attendees at the Software & Information Industry Association's 2006 summit in Manhattan. The proposed digitization projection is "not serving users; it's serving Google," he said.

Of course, it's no secret that McGraw-Hill objects to Google's planned digitization project; after all, the publishing company sued Google to try and stop it.

But why the publishing world opposes Google so vehemently on this issue is baffling. Google has no intention of displaying more than a few snippets of text. If readers are interested, they can purchase the books. It's inevitable that at least some consumers will buy books as a result of this project.

So why does the publishing world object? McGraw's explanations were unpersuasive. The plan is unsatisfactory, he said, because Google "presumes to tell content providers and customers what is best." And, he argued, Google's "one-size-fits-all" approach will preclude publishers from learning what works best online.

But these arguments don't hold up. Google might take a one-size-fits-all approach in terms of how it displays search results, but there's nothing to stop publishing houses from taking their own online approaches.

In fact, if McGraw-Hill and other publishers have an online strategy in mind that they think will result in a new wave of book sales, they should go ahead with it. Neither Google nor any other company is stopping them. In the meantime, it's hard to see what publishers lose when a few paragraphs of books that would otherwise gather dust in libraries become available online.