Two years after launching a universal book-scanning program that set a lot of publishers teeth on edge (and sent some running to their lawyers), Google is getting credit for turning "searchers into consumers."

That’s the verdict from Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press who estimates that a million customers have used Google to view 12,000 of her titles and that sales growth has been "significant."

Not everyone is convinced.

Beyond the hue and cry from some publishers, others don’t concede any magic to Google Book Search. Penguin, for example, says Amazon is a more useful partner, citing a 7 percent increase in sales for books included in Amazon’s "Search Inside" tool. HarperCollins is among those who are building their own digital vaults.

But the nightmare scenarios of the-end-of-publishing-as-we-know-it don’t seem likely to play out.

• Springer Science + Business reports a Long Tail effect from Google Book Search with viewings of 99 percent of its 30,000 titles and growing backlist sales.
• Osprey press found 40 percent of Google Book Search click-throughs went to Amazon and 30 percent went directly to the Osprey site in the first half of 2006.
• Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter’s encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times in Google Book Search, with a 44 percent click-through to buy the book. About 25 percent of 1206 viewers clicked through to purchase Principles of Visual Anthropology.
• Hendrik teNeues said a new marketing campaign and inclusion in Google’s Book Search doubled his company’s online sales of coffee-table books.

"Everyone involved agrees," writes the Washington Post’s Bob Thompson, "that search helps people discover books they want. Everyone also agrees that in an ideal world, once those books are found, there’d be a quick way for the finders to pay to access the actual text — all of it or just part of it, whatever they need." Indeed, early results suggest there’s a win\win in searchable online texts. To which we say, "Hasten the day."