This past weekend, we spoke to a handful of prominent indie publishers–Graywolf, Coffee House, and Melville House–plus some periodicals at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference. Clearly, all of them are eager to embrace the digital revolution, and the next few months is go-time.

It seems like indie presses have been waiting until there was a critical mass of devices and readers for eBooks before jumping in. This makes sense–there’s a lot of overhead for an indie press to get started with eBooks. Perhaps it also took this long for the necessary kinds of partnerships to be available and affordable. Both Graywolf and Coffee House are going with BookMobile for eBook converstion; BookMobile seems to be moving itself into the position of the big eBook clearing house for little publishers. Melville has the advantage of distributing with Random House, which already has its programs well underway.

As far as this blogger can tell, eBooks represent huge potential for indie presses, once lots and lots of their books are available digitally. These are books, remember, that one sometimes has to hunt down in bookstores, or that one wouldn’t know about unless one was following the scene. Once they’re digitized, they’ll be linked to by bloggers and readers, accessible from all points on the literary Web. By next year’s AWP, we’ll be reporting digital sales figures, strong ones, we’re willing to bet.

Poets & Writers Magazine is one of the major info sources for the creative writing community and an important presence at AWP. This blogger stopped by their table and got into a conversation with P&W editor Mary Gannon about the iPad when it occurred to her that the magazine’s newly launched digital edition is readable on Apple’s “magical” device.

Poets & Writers signed on with Coverleaf, a Web-based magazine distribution platform. The P&W digital edition launched with the March/ April issue.

We talked today to Graywolf Press‘s “eBook Taskforce,” who said they too are in the process of getting their list into digital format. BookMobile is handling conversion–because, said managing editor Katie Dublinski, they want to preserve the control over production values they have with BookMobile. Graywolf eBooks will be distributed, however, through Macmillan, which also distributes the press’s print books.

Dublinski said they plan to have most of their frontlist titles up by fall, and that they are also converting selected backlist, though not in a chronological manner. Interestingly, since much of Graywolf’s list is poetry, the press has decided to make those titles available as PDFs in order to preserve formatting. Many presses have been holding off on doing poetry eBooks because in most cases line breaks aren’t preserved on eReaders.

Graywolf does have one title currently available in digital form: Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, which has been exclusively available for Kindle since 2008, said Dublinski, Amazon approached them when the book was a surprise success when it was published.

We stopped by the Coffee House Press booth at AWP, where editor Anitra Budd confirmed that the press has signed with BookMobile for eBook warehousing and distribution. The deal’s just been inked, and Coffee House is hoping to launch their first eBooks in the next four months or so.

The plan is to start with the fall season frontlist and then do selected titles from the backlist. Budd mentioned that novelist Laird Hunt was likely to be among those first backlist authors launched as eBooks. Coffee House has published all four of Hunt’s novels.

BookMobile also handles eBooks for Graywolf press, whom we are hoping to track down later today.

Tons of indie presses are here at AWP. We stopped by the Melville House booth to talk about how the Brooklyn-based publisher is feeling about eBooks. Publisher Dennis Loy Johnson said he was excited and about the press’s early success.

Melville distributes its books through Random House, which also handles its eBooks. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada was Melville’s first eBook title. It came out last September, and Johnson said he was “shocked” by how well it sold, though he didn’t offer any numbers.

He also said the house was in the beginning stages of developing its own app through which various kinds of content could be delivered to mobile devices. What Johnson described sounded a bit like the McSweeneys app, with subscription services and various kinds of content delivered through a single platform.

eBookNewser is reporting this week from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference. It is, among other things, a kind of giant town hall meeting of most of America’s independent publishers. The biggest attraction of the conference–which is attended by creative writers, writing students and teachers, and publishers–is the book fair where publishers sell thousands and thousands of books. Of course, those are all print books.

But we’ll be talking to everyone we can–the folks from presses like Graywolf, Milkweed, and Coffeehouse, to see where they are in the digital book plans. As far as this blogger can see, eBooks represent huge opportunities for small publishers. We’ll let you know if they think so too.