E-books: changing The dynamics of publishing
With e-readers and e-books emerging to catch the fancy of bibliophiles, are physical books losing out in the race of being the favourite? RAHI GAIKWAD finds out.
If Leo Tolstoy were alive today there are chances that he might have considered giving ‘War and Peace’ a rest after a few hundred pages. Imagine carrying that tome on the local train and reading it standing while being compressed from all sides. More war less peace.
The rush of smart phones and e-readers aided by the internet, offering myriad social networking options, is slowly changing people’s reading habits. When was the last time you visited a book store, let alone a library? Though digital reading is still in its nascent stage in India, publishers are increasingly devising strategies to shape this transition.
Akash Shah of Jaico Publishing House welcomes the shifting preference towards e-readers. He says the transition is a marketing idea rather than an organic development among readers. Online retail giant Amazon, who controls a major chunk of the e-book market in India and abroad, has been aggressively pushing Kindle in the Indian market, driving decisions for other publishers.
“The ebook trend has been a bit slow in India. Huge projections were made three years ago, but later the trend petered out. However, last year, ebook sales started to pick up again. Ebooks comprise two to five per cent of our total revenue. When it reaches 15 per cent in the next one or two years, we will start publishing ebooks. They complement hard books rather than cannibalise them. In certain segments, such as mythology, biography, history it is the physical book that scores. The area of education books is still lagging behind. The quality of tablets has to improve,” Mr. Shah says.
Another city firm Leadstart Publishing pointed to publishers’ tilt towards creating “crisper reads” for the digitised reading format. “Pages are being reduced, and audio (text-to-speech) is being added to books. Publishers are conceptualising enhanced ebooks (with embedded video/audio), condensed ebooks (especially for non-fiction, several publishing firms are releasing the condensed version of the book as a shorter read, priced differently. If the reader likes the condensed book, he/she may explore buying the full version), subscription format (subscription-driven business models for audio books targeted towards mobile /tab users). New age publishing firms are focussed on creating books primarily for smart-phone users,” says Leadstart CEO Swarup Nanda.
Pune-based APK Publishers, which deals mostly with first-time writers, has worked out a world limit for ebooks, partly due to reduced attention span of readers and the constraints on their time. “With WhatsApp and Twitter, our reading span has been adversely affected. I was approached by an author who closed his book at 100,000 words. As far as I am concerned that is a problem. I asked him if there was a logical break point so that we can have two books. A range of 40,000 to 60,000 words is appropriate for an ebook, so that it feels substantial and we can price it suitably. We are selling more ebooks than a few years ago,” says APK CEO Prashant Karhade.
As ebooks cut down production costs and increase accessibility of writers, they have given birth to an astronomical number of books and writers. Though the current market is driven by Kindle which sticks to a traditional format of digitising a physical book in blackand-white, Mr. Karhade feels ebooks need to break all constraints and engage readers with colour and audio/video content to really stand apart.
New age authors too have to keep in mind the digital audience during the process of writing. ‘Waiting for Jonathan Koshy’ author Murzban Shroff says the novel was growing into a sprawling text and he “pared it down to make sure it could be published in the ebook format.”
“It has 186 pages. It threatened to go to 250. I had huge sections of non-fiction on socio-cultural contexts. I thought why am I doing this on the reader’s time. So I pared down those sections. I am not conscious while writing, but keep digital parameters in mind. You have to understand the scrolling pattern. People want quick racy reads. I respect readers’ time. The Indian economy is in transition and there is a deep struggle for time. You can’t be so indulgent that you describe how rainwater falls on a leaf. Fiction has to be compressed. Writers are competing with Facebook and Twitter,” Mr. Shroff reasons.
For emerging writers, Kindle can save the day when their work is rejected. “My first novel ‘Wasted in Engineering’ was self-published through Notion Press in paper format. My second book maybe published on Kindle if the big publishers reject the concept. For the Indian young adult section, I think the right number of pages for the book would be between 180 and 250. For the mass audience, dominated by Chetan Bhagat, the maximum number of pages is 300. This is purely a market assessment, not a literary one,” says Chennai author Prabhu Swaminathan.
In this pursuit of shorter reads, what happens then to the future of humanities courses is anybody’s guess. While accessibility to books has increased, the fewer visits to the library could be a drawback for literature students, feels Dr. Prasita Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, English Department, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Concerns over “copy-paste” assignments have led teachers to use plagiarism detection software.
“If students go to the library and browse books, they would read beyond what is exactly required. On the other hand, with access to international literary journals, they are reading more contemporary material,” Dr. Mukherjee says.
For social science students such as Nilesh Kumar from TISS, the lower prices and ease of carrying are the two major plus points of ereaders. “Now there is no excuse to not finding time to read. I recently picked up the habit of reading on my mobile and I am enjoying it,” he says.
Yet for some young readers the smell and tactility of a book means everything. “Many times I buy a hard copy even though I have an ebook,” says Anubha Hatwal, an MA literature student at SNDT.
The coming years will tell how far this digital experience is able to significantly change the way we engage with books and reading.