Unlike many other industries, the publishing industry is fragmented with various categories — children books publishers, trade book publishers, text book publishers and many more. Each has its own set of issues, which somehow, somewhere are different from one another. However, in spite of being so fragmented, there is one common issue that invariably revolves around them — it is cost. “Cost is a common denominator affecting all kinds of publishers, and because they are so influenced by cost, it can be a strong agenda for the publishers to come together in solidarity in the otherwise fragmented publishing industry,” says Sahil Gupta, director of V&S Publishers.
Vicious hazards
Publishers don’t like it when they have to price their titles high. When the cost of a book is high, in order to protect margins, publishers are forced to price the book high. In a market with low- buying capacity, this leads to sales dips and the only resort for publishers then is to reduce the print run. But this is a strategy that has always let the publishers down. With a reduced print run, the book cost further increases, thereby increasing the book price furthermore. “It is a vicious cycle,” says Gupta. “There was a time when the number of copies that a publisher used to print was not less than 2,500 to 3,000. And that number has now come down to as low as 500 for certain publishers. This is all because of the vicious impact of price. Inflation and paper prices are shooting up, and the costs of each of the associates like binders, printers, to name a few, have increased contributing to the increase of the basic cost of books. In such a situation, the price needs to be increased although the buying capacity has not increased.”
So, what then should the publishers do? “It is high time that publishers came together and took the initiative
— may be they can approach the ministry and appeal to the government to acknowledge that there is an
industry called printing and publishing. The government recognizes education as an industry but in that industry, the government does not see us publishers as a part of it. For the Indian government, the education industry is purely about schools, colleges and infrastructure. It spends
huge amount of money in developing education infrastructure. But what they don’t understand is that holistic education cannot be complete without all kind of books. There has to be a contribution from different kinds of books. It need not be only publishers of text books, it could be children books, trade books and many more that should come together,” says Gupta.
Need for paper cost subsidization
Datawind’s tablet, called Aakash (sky in Hindi), was launched by the Indian government with a focus on education. The Aakash tablet is selling for around US$ 64, and comes loaded with a basic school curriculum. The government aims to eventually provide every child with something similar. The tablet cost has been subsidized by the Indian government heavily to sell to students. “Before providing Datawind tablets at such a heavily subsidized price, why not subsidize paper cost?” asks Gupta. “Subsidizing paper cost will allow books to be sold at a cheaper price. But that the government is not doing, instead it is giving a device which will only diminish the reading habit of students.”
Reading habits going down
“Everywhere I go, everybody is saying that the publishing industry is growing with increased number of titles coming along. Yes, in terms of number, the publishing industry is growing but simply because the number of books produced is growing,” says Gupta. Because India is a young country, with 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35, there is a lot of consumption of books at the text book level. For example, a lot of competitive exams take place nowadays. Earlier if a student had appeared for one competitive exam, now they appear for ten different competitive exams, studying five different competitive books. As a result, the consumption of books related to competitive exams, entrance exams and the likes are increasing. “Remove these academic titles from the count and then you see where the growth is, I am sure, you will not see growth,” says Gupta. One reason for this could be the reading habit is going down. Or it may be that the right literature is not there; may be there is right literature, but it is not reaching the right market. And, many times, there are excellent titles that readers come across, but they probably do not even care to read them because of the high price.
