The Fallacy of "Nimbleness"

It seems like an accepted truism that small publishers are more nimble and quicker to adapt to change than large publishing houses, probably on the basis of all the layers of bureaucracy that a large publishing house has to claw through in order to change the status quo. When analyzing a publishing house in terms of content, this is probably the case; a smaller editorial staff means that there are less people to object to an "experimental" book.

I would have to disagree, though, with all the people out there who say that the nimbleness of small publishers makes them ideally situated to take advantage of the possibilities of ebooks. The problem here is that we aren't talking about new content--we're talking about new delivery channels. These new delivery channels require some technical expertise to be able to work effectively with, let alone imaginatively. And that requires staff whose jobs are to check out new technologies and see how to do stuff with them; in short, it requires a research and development team.

Most small publishers that I know of barely scrape by. They make enough to pay the bills, pay themselves, and have enough left over to get started on another book or two, but that's about it. There's no money to fund research in a small publisher. I would guess that most small publishers out there don't even have the money for an IT staff. What this means is that small publishers, by and large, are not the ones who are doing exciting new things with technology. Sure, there are some exceptions, but most of the innovative uses of technology are going to come from the big houses. Small presses who don't have the technical know-how to develop new solutions on their own are going to follow the lead of the big houses.

If any publishers are nimble in regards to innovative uses of technology, it's the mid-size to large houses; they're the ones who have the staff to explore new options. It's certainly quite possible for a small press to take advantage of digital technology and ebooks to do something really fascinating and new, but I would argue that most small publishers don't have the resources to do so. Small publishers may be more organizationally nimble, but that nimbleness doesn't do much good wthout resources, either in the form of cash or in the form of on-board knowledge about digital technologies. If small publishers want to take advantage of their nimbleness, they need to acquire the knowledge to do so; they need to study online technologies, learn XML, maybe some basic web design, and try to understand what sorts of things are possible in this brave new world of digital publishing and what sort of things aren't.