Harold McGraw III, chairman, president and chief executive officer of The McGraw-Hill Companies gave the opening Keynote here this morning at SIIA. His talk set the tone for the day, achieving growth and helping other people be part of it…..it's all about participation and interdependence.
We are going through a transformation and quoting Peter Drucker on the similarities between the growth of information to the growth of the Railroads and telegraph in the 19th century and the emergence of Radio, TV and the mass market of the 20th century. The mass-market will not go away, but we are now witnessing the rise of the mini-markets, niche markets. The democratization of the media as we move from an industrial economy to a global information economy.
Then he got to the battlefield subject of piracy, we live in intellectual copyright courts. McGraw Hill along with many other content providers have taken a stand against Google's plan to digitize and enable the search of their copyright properties. Google's book search benefits Google and their stockholders not it's users.