While ePublishing has certainly interested many publishers in India, including those that publish in Indian languages, there are many issues that still remain to be addressed. These relate to the infrastructure needed to provide an environment in which the development and dissemination of digital content can be carried out seamlessly. India now boasts of being the third largest internet user base, boosted by the high penetration of 3G networks and large sales of smartphones and tablets. The large user base has in fact prompted many technology companies to focus on products and services that address the concerns of non-English speakers.
For publishers, these developments open up the possibility of reaching out to a new set of users — those that have little access to printed books but now might be able to access knowledge through digital media. Publishers who master the intricacies of this new opportunity are likely to be amongst the most successful.
The Publishing Next conference at the New Delhi World Book Fair in association with NBT carried forward this discussion.
Examining the issues encountered by Maithili, Kannada, Punjabi, Hindi and Santali publishers, the first session was moderated by Vinutha Mallya, a Bengaluru-based publishing consultant. Panellists Desraj Kali, Alind Maheshwari, Mangal Majhi, Sridhar Gowda and Gouri Nath — all publishers and with considerable knowledge of the publishing environment in their respective languages, made it quite clear that many of the language publishers in the country are doing most of the required chores without any institutional support.
The ePublishing panel included Swaran Lata, country head of W3C in India; Shiva Kumar, who manages strategic relationships at Google Books; Badri Seshadri, co-founder of New Horizon Media, Debasri Rakshit, who works for HarperCollins and is involved with their ePublishing initiatives; and Vishal Salgotra, director of business development at Contentra Technologies India, who has extensive experience with content management. Venkatesh Hariharan, director of Knowledge Commons, who has considerable experience in the development of fonts and tools for Indian language publishing, moderated the discussion.
The session concentrated on issues that have impeded the growth of ePublishing in India. It focused on infrastructural challenges that have undermined the proliferation of eBooks in India — the non-availability of adequate fonts, the absence of a home-grown reader and the absence of well-evolved tools such as OCR that could facilitate the development of eBooks within an Indian context.
Swaran Lata, showed some of the government initiatives regarding regional language eBook publishing. Although optimistic about the Indian situation, Lata suggested that a complete paradigm shift has to come in publishing.
While the eBook division of Google in India was launched in February 2013, Google has introduced several innovations in publishing with the biggest of them all, according to Google India’s Shiva Kumar, being the proximity to the end-user.
Debasri Rakshit a copy editor at HarperCollins India, said that although eBooks have already garnered a revenue share of 30 to 35% in the US and 18 to 19% in the UK, the current figure in India is less than 1% — thus the market can only improve.
There is also the question of government support for the development and distribution of digital content for ePublishing to take off in Indian languages.
Fonts must be developed that adequately mirror the aesthetic qualities of the printed book. Similarly, tools that aid the growth of eBooks must themselves be developed and made widely available.
At the end of the day, a visibly relaxed Leonard Fernandes of Cinnamonteal Publishing, the chief brain behind Publishing Next, said the Delhi conference was successful in eliciting interest in a very short time, although there is scope for improvement.
Nevertheless, Fernandes has already started preparing for the next Publishing Next conference in Goa scheduled in September 2014 and said he hoped to receive continued cooperation and support from the publishing industry.
