Fleet Publishers are Small Publishers

Peter Brantley -- Via the Christian Science Monitor, an article noting that the fleetest among the publishers are often the smaller (same in other domains as well, of course):

"In an otherwise bleak Jan. 23 report on November sales – a 14.4 percent decline over the same period in 2007 – the Association of American Publishers noted that e-book business had more than doubled for the month, to $5.1 million. Over the course of the year, e-book sales were up 63.8 percent. It is in these figures that many industry analysts see hope for the publishing industry at large, which is turning slowly – and not without some grumbling – toward mass digitization.

"But it's not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest. Instead, some of the most extensive restructuring efforts are being undertaken in the independent publishing world, traditionally a hotbed for innovation and experimentation.

"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."