Publishing in the sub continent is hard and yet filled with enormous amounts of potential. Read Profile Books' Digital Publishing Director Michael Bhaskar's asessment of India's publishing challenges and opportunities in this second report on the future of India's booktrade.

On the verge of a step change
(by Michael Bhaskar)

India is the perennial promised land of English language publishing. Tantalisingly huge, buoyant growth rates steaming ahead of decayed and sclerotic home markets, English largely welcomed – it always seems like the Next Big Thing and absorbs a corresponding amount of attention. Yet sales in India are never quite what people expect, the exponential trigger on the income graph never quite arrives, despite the work, and the reason is quite simple: publishing in India is exceptionally challenging. They say the four most expensive words in history are “This time it’s different”...but here goes nothing.

Why is publishing hard in India?
Firstly there is the scale of the country, and the lack of adequate infrastructure to allow seamless distribution. The sprawling, doughty railways may be reasonably reliable but they are slow, and the road network is unable to compensate, while air freight is unable to handle the fine grained burden of shipping multiple units over a wide area. Even for internet deliveries then, getting product to market represents a far greater logistical challenge than in most Western countries. Retail chains like Crossword are relatively new, and relatively small. Getting space in bookshops is, as anywhere, a constant battle, but exacerbated by this distributional complexity.

Secondly, books are disproportionately expensive. Most books are priced at a comparative level to the UK, yet this in a country where the average income is perhaps one twentieth of the UK’s. Fundamental economics mean books will never become a mass product when priced so uncompetitively against the general market.

Thirdly, many outside India are liable to forget this is a country of over one thousand languages, with around 30 being spoken by a million or more people, and some such as Bengali, Marathi, Tamil or Telugu spoken by a population larger than that of France. The dominant language is of course Hindi, spoken as a first language by some 400 million people and the official language of government. All this should make us realise that viewing India as simply an English speaking territory is wrong – English is a minority language, and still large the preserve of an elite – and also that many regional tensions and pride, as in Europe, based in language, are at stake in the publishing scene.

Education and class also play a role. Since sloughing off the worst excesses of the “Licence-Permit Raj” in 1991, the middle class has exploded in size and wealth, opening up both the financial means and the leisure time for the enjoyment of books. However there are still significant pressures on the ability of many, both monetary and social, that mitigates against widespread adoption of book buying, and we should be wary of simply porting over Western models of reading into Indian contexts. Just as Bollywood is a distinctively sub continental take on Hollywood (and an industry increasingly bigger in budgets, audiences and revenues than its American counterpart), so Indian tastes have many local intricacies not perhaps apparent to those publishing from afar in the centres of London or New York, a fact only partially addressed by opening Indian outposts of major Western publishers.

Lastly piracy, in print, is still a large problem, with unauthorised editions of popular titles being found for sales all across India – and for prices that are far more appealing, not to mention realistic, than legitimate copies. Piracy solves questions of distribution and cost even as the enforcement of intellectual property rights is at best uneven, so without knowing the exact impact on bona fide sales, it is likely high, and certainly much higher than publishers in the West would be used to. A further fear is that of corruption which can distort reading lists for schools and other state institutions, adds a financial burden on publishers and favours certain players in the area.

Sales figures are low across the board – a new title might be expected to sell a couple of thousand copies, perhaps the same as in the UK, perhaps considerably less, in a country that accounts for more than one in six of the entire human race; somewhere around, or under, 2% of the population are meaningful readers of books. Given all these challenges Indian publishers have done an incredible job producing a diverse and successful publishing scene, encompassing corporate multi-nationals and vibrant, feisty independents, English language academic specialists and populist local language children’s publishers alike.

It’s still hard. And it’s still filled with mind boggling amounts of potential.
My hunch is that we are now on the verge of a step change. The most obvious indicator is the wider, epochal shift in the economy as relative wealth and power seeps from the G7 to the BRICs, with India enjoying annual growth rates of 7-8% a year, a booming stock market, a technology and services industry based in hubs like Bangalore that is becoming second to none, whole new smart, connected, wealthy towns like Gurgaon and Noida ringing the older urban centres of Delhi and elsewhere, symbols of new found industrial confidence like the Tata Nano. The Indian economy is at the epicentre of an historic transition lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and taking hundreds of millions more into the fold of large scale discretionary consumerism. This is the wider context, and so far so well known.

On top of this there are changes in the publishing landscape being driven by this rise in living standards meeting new technology. Flipkart is an Indian ecommerce site that lets users pay once they have received the title, the initial fear being that no one would buy books over the internet as, given the difficulties of distribution, their purchase stood a relatively high chance of being lost (I have no idea whether this is the case, but that was the fear). In addition cards are rare and there is no Paypal equivalent, largely thanks to the notoriously unwieldy demands of the bureaucracy. Flipkart’s high-risk inverted payment model negates this, and despite widespread scepticism has now become probably the largest single bookseller in the country, in the process building an innovative distribution system that relies on a decentralised network of nodes, couriers, and specialist Flipkart deliverers in the major metros.

Flipkart proves internet retailing will work. Couple this with high mobile penetration rates, and you have the makings of a digital economy of unprecedented scale. Smartphones have, to date, low take up, largely because they are expensive, in the case of the iPhone perversely more expensive in India than in Europe. Supply will increase, extensions of credit and contracts will become more prevalent and easier to sign up, and smart phones, with a billion out there globally, will find a huge new market.

India’s expertise in software and publishing will put it in a strong position to capitalise on this expansion in connectivity, an expansion that is being underpinned by federal and state government initiatives taking place on a truly gargantuan scale: the state of Tamil Nadu will, for instance, distribute seven million laptops to school children in the next few years and the authorities in Delhi are trying to develop an affordable tablet for schools across the nation. Already the hub of publisher outsourcing operations, with knowledge transfer from multinationals pouring in, as it did in the UK, publishers in Delhi or Chennai will have tech capacity on their doorstep. Moreover digital delivery holds out the prospect that pricing might come down to the level – thought to be $1 or below – where books could reach a truly mass audience. There is a concerted effort beginning to build to overcome the admittedly daunting technical challenge of publishing electronically in local scripts through a characteristic deployment of ingenuity.

The Bookfair will, as ever, act as a mediating force in this growth – no one doubts the value of face to face meetings, of making new contacts and sealing deals. I would expect to see a growing Indian presence at the fair as Indian publishers become global players, selling foreign rights as the prime publisher, and ensuring digital distribution on all platforms. We will also see a growing presence of Indian service providers. Typically US and European service providers have been prevalent, but I imagine many new Indian outfits will want to put themselves front and centre.

In short, ingredients are coming together that were never there before. Those rightly best placed to take advantage will be Indian publishers. But with rumours of, amongst others, Amazon taking an interest, much to the trepidation and consternation of Indian publishers and retailers, it will be a busy, combustible and morphing market, with probably the only certainty being the ever growing nature of the pie. That is something for everyone to be excited about – not least Indian readers, and potential readers.

Michael Bhaskar is Digital Publishing Director at Profile Books and can be found on Twitter as @ajaxlogos. He has recently returned from a digital publishing conference, Publishing Next, in India.