E-books and small publishers: The little guys' advantage over the giants

First-hand I’ve witnessed the pain that eBabel and other complexities can inflict on small publishers like Lida Quillen who are trying to do both E and P. Many can’t afford to farm out conversion and other duties to specialists.

But in some ways the little guys actually enjoy an edge. They lack the big corpocracies where people so often feud over when and how to take e-books seriously. Luddites still shape policy at some large houses.

In a related vein, the Christian Science Monitor notes progress that some respected small presses are making with e-books:

Last month, in a much-trumpeted example, New York’s Soft Skull Press announced it would begin to move its entire catalog online. Richard Nash, Soft Skull’s publisher, tells the Monitor, "The aim is to have every one of our front- and back-list books available [digitally] by the end of the year." (Heavily illustrated books, which are very expensive and unwieldy to convert, will likely be the exception.) If successful, it would be a feat unmatched by any corporate publisher.

Meanwhile, Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books in Brooklyn, says he is in talks with Amazon and Sony, which produces its own digital reader, and hopes to begin making a swath of e-book content available as early as February.

"Right now, we’re at the turning point," Mr. Temple says. "There are lots of reasons to get excited: economic reasons and environmental reasons. People are realizing digitization is inevitable."

Quoted in the Monitor, our own Paul Biba weighs in with some astute observations:

"In general, I’d say the big publishers tend to be really dinosaurs, intrigued by e-books but afraid of them," says Paul Biba, the coeditor of Teleread, a leading e-book blog. "[Younger readers] have grown up with a whole different way of looking at the world, and I don’t think many publishers understand this. They think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books."