Two years ago TeleRead ran Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti‘s post on Why a distinguished small press isn’t publishing e-books yet: Godine designer speaks out. A small literary house, heavy on poetry collections like the one shown here, Godine did not feel that it was ready for the technology or vice versa.
How about today? Are traditional independent publishers, not the born-digital variety, going for e-books in a major way?
Based on my experiences at PMA Publishing University, which piggybacked on BookExpo America in Los Angeles, I would say that the indies still have a long way to go. E just didn’t come up at the core of the many interesting discussions. Typical small publishers still do not think the format is going to grow fast enough to be a major factor in the book business for several years.
Indies behind a high percentage of the 400,000 new titles a year
In a keynoter at the PMA gathering, Michael Healy, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, observed that there are 102 thousand active small book publishing companies in the United States. Collectively, they control and produce a very large portion of the nearly 400,000 new books produced each year in the U.S. If they, as a group, decide to put that content into e-book formats, the effect on the market will be significant.
Whether it would be good, bad, or both is yet to be determined, but change we can guarantee.
Leaders see e-growth eventually
The most common indie approach toward e-books was expressed rather clearly in one portion of Thursday’s keynote. The speakers were David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books, and Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books. Perseus Books has a huge influence through ownership of three major distributors (Consortium, PGW and Perseus Distribution), as well as the imprints it owns. Johnny Temple is known for applying to Akashic the creativity that made him a rock star as the bass player for the group Girls against Boys.
Both men agreed that e-books were almost certain to become a significant format, that the book, regardless of format, would continue to be central to our lives, and that authors and publishers will continue to be central to the process of creating book-length content for readers.
eBabel alert
Mr. Steinberger made the cogent point that publishers can’t afford to marry themselves to a tech company or to one format, because we can’t predict when those tech companies will leave the business (Microsoft Live Search, anyone?) or which format will eventually become the dominant one.
Mr. Temple’s most interesting point on this subject was that books will inevitably become more digitized, and available in pieces and as a whole, for a variety of reasons including economics and environmental preservation.
But neither speaker seemed to think that e-books are going to have much impact in the near term.
