PHYSICAL BOOKS GET A MAKEOVER

Mirza Salim Beg is an archetypal old world bookstore manager; he is always abreast of the reading choices of the loyal customers of New Book Land – a 40-year-old small kiosk he manages in central Delhi’s popular Janpath area. He is soft-spoken and polite, but ever keen to debate or suggest changes to his customers’ wish list of books.

“The initial enthusiasm with e-readers and ebooks has subsided, physical books are back in favour,” he tells HT, pointing at the floor to ceiling stock inside the store. “Publishers are reaching out to newer audiences, and literature fests and social media promotions have rekindled an interest in books. Readers too are keen to explore new authors and topics,” he adds. “Non-fiction is turning out to be a big draw.”

In 2015, Nielsen, which studies consumer behaviour, came out with a first-of-its-kind report on India’s fragmented book market. It valued the print book market in India, including imports, at $3.9 billion, positioning the country among the largest English-language book markets in the world.

WHAT’S IN A COVER?

Publishers are exploring different ways to attract newer audiences, such as releasing special editions of their backlists. “Special editions are done mostly for books that withstand and transcend the test of time,” says Yogesh Sharma, vice-president, sales, and marketing, Bloomsbury India. On its 30th anniversary in 2016, Bloomsbury’s UK office published special editions of 10 of its prize-winners (such as The English Patient, The Song of Achilles), books that have reinvented a genre (such as Eat Pray Love, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and books that have captured people’s hearts (The Kite Runner, Restless or The Little Friend). The publisher hopes that the ‘Bloomsbury Modern Classics’ with new covers will attract contemporary readers. It has also done anniversary editions to commemorate the success of a book: Earlier this year, to celebrate 20 years of Harry Potter, it brought out four special House Editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Each edition features the individual house crest on the jacket and line illustrations exclusive to that house by Kate Greenaway Medal winner Levi Pinfold. Exciting new extra content includes fact files and profiles of favourite characters.

Then there are the movie tie-in covers such as for Victoria & Abdul, where the artwork is drawn from the movie’s promotional features. New Delhi-based Niyogi Books has also done new covers for revised editions. For example, Marion Molteno’s If You Can Walk You Can Dance – a moving story about a woman’s journey of self-discovery as she feels apartheid in South Africa – has a new cover after it acquired the rights to publish the book in South Asia.

Penguin-Random House India (PRHI) turned 30 this year. To celebrate, it unveiled ‘Penguin30’, a selection of India’s brilliant writing including classics such as Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam and Nehru’s An Autobiography, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. The publisher has left books on the Delhi Metro so that commuters can pick them up and read. In an increasingly visual age, publishers are also paying a lot of attention to book covers to attract readers. “Given the visual excitement these days, our eye will not stop for a moment unless something ‘exciting’ or ‘unique’ confronts it,” says Seagull Books’ senior editor and graphic designer Sunandini Banerjee. There is, however, no accurate methodology to track sales linked to book covers.

In The Clothing of Books, Jhumpa Lahiri writes that today a book cover’s work is not just about reflecting the sense and style of the book: “Its [book cover’s] function is much more commercial than aesthetic. It succeeds or fails in the market”. In the US and Italy, if a first edition doesn’t sell well enough, the cover is changed for the paperback edition. Freelance bookcover designer Aparajita Ninan, who works with India’s top publishers, says most designs happen for classics or modern classics that have to be re-jacketed to inject a new excitement into a best-seller. For authors too, covers are critical and publishing houses often take their inputs while designing them.

“The cover of a book is the face of the book, and with which, a potential reader has the first encounter,” says Sudeep Chakravarti. His latest – The Bengalis (Aleph Book Company) – has a stunning jacket of a boy playing football outside an old house in Kolkata. The image, besides being elegant and arresting, conveys several layers of the Bengali – the people as well as the book.

But finally what is critical for a book to make an impact, all respondents to this story agreed, is not the book cover but what is in it.