The Global eBook Report: Current Conditions & Future Projections. Update October 2013

Akbar Road by Rasheed Kidwai, an account of the Congress Party’s hold on the Centre, is priced at Rs 375 ($6.25) in paperback, and Rs 295.45 ($5) in Kindle edition.
    Self publishing
    Many Indian authors are taking advantage of self-publishing services, for example those offered by CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Service and Pothi . Amazon’s Kindle Direct Programme became a greater attraction in August 2012, when the company allowed authors and publishers to set Indian rupee prices on the Kindle Store. For many of these new authors, ebook-first is a safe bet, requiring minimal investment. With Smashwords’ books now available on Flipkart in India, this platform is also likely to gain interest among authors looking to self-publish.
    Well-known author Ashok Banker , best known for the bestselling Ramayana series (Penguin Books India), set up his own ebook store, AKB eBooks .Com in 2011. For Banker, the attraction towards ebook publishing was not about the cost of production, but instead, it was the ease and the low cost of distribution and purchase.
    The success of self-published author Amish Tripathi , whose mythological fiction series, Shiva Trilogy , earned him a $ 90,000 advance from publishers Westland recently, has given hope to aspiring writers. Tripathi’s Immortals of Meluha, the first of the Trilogy, was first published by him in February 2010. The book was re-printed thrice within the following week, and by the end of July it had sold around 45,000 copies across India. After the book’s initial success, Westland picked up the series for publication. The Trilogy has sold more than 1.7 million copies in print within a two-and-half year period, with retail sales of over Rs 43 crore ($7.17 m). It has been hailed as “the fastest selling book series in the history of Indian publishing.”
    Having foreseen an opportunity, Penguin Books India along with Author Solutions, launched a self-publishing imprint, Partridge India, in early 2013. Every Partridge India title is released in digital format as an e-book, and print format is offered as an option.
    Localisation efforts
    The fact that English enjoys a privileged status in India and is also the language of instruction for almost all higher education courses in the country, chiefly for STM subjects and professional courses. Publishers of Indian-language content have a few hurdles to surmount before e-publishing in these languages can catch up with the pace of change taking place in English publishing. The most important obstacle is that computing with Indic scripts has been a struggle due to the presence of multiple standards in text encoding and keyboard layouts, as well as because of poor Indic-script support on reading devices. Often fonts need to be bundled with the content files. Readers require plug-ins to be able to read such files on their devices. Although agencies of the government, not-for-profit organisations, and also technologists’ groups and industry bodies are making efforts, especially for adoption of UNICODE standards, there is still a distance to cover in this regard.
    (Some of the publishers in Indian languages who have launched their ebook lists, and the platforms which support them are mentioned in the trade e-books section above.)
    A Tamil e-reader application, NHM Reader , was recently launched by the Chennai -based publishing company, New Horizon Media . The cloud-based ereader application, inspired by the Kindle app and its features, is currently available for iOS. The app will allow readers to adjust font sizes and background colours. New Horizon Media is developing the NHM Reader for Android devices too. The company, which has been involved in developing a series of Indian-language software applications, also runs an online retail store.
    Notes 1. Indian Youth: Demographics and Readership – Results from the National Youth Readership Survey 2009, National Book Trust, India in association with National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi: 2010. See the table of contents and an executive summary here.
    Source: Vernacular Report 2012. Report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with IMRB International, Mumbai: January 2013.
Source: Mobile Internet in India – December 2012. Report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with IMRB International, Mumbai: January 2013.
Source: Personal interview with Malcolm Neill, Director Content Acquisition and Publisher