Prayatna

How TV changed the movie industry and how Internet could change the book publishing industry

A comment on a post about the impact of the Internet on the publishing industry makes an neat analogy. It suggests that the Internet will probably change the book publishing industry the way TV changed the old movie industry.

The old movie studio system is similar to the current publishing houses. Centralized production and promotion. The studios died and currently, the big movie stars have to hire their own staff of promotion people to support their celebrity. It used to be that this was handled by the studio. The internet offers the opportunity to decentralize the process. Independent marketers, writers, editors working a project like an actor or director for a movie. Better get a good agent quick.

I had earlier written about how Amazon could do an eBay for book publishing.

Rather than relying on publishers who decide what to publish and take on the risks of publishing a title, a new entity could help authors by setting up an eBay like portal for publishing tasks. Authors could then take on the risks of publishing (keeping all the rewards to themselves), and outsource all the actual tasks of a publishing house to editors, printers, distributors, marketing agents etc. who would all bid for jobs by various authors, through the eBay like portal.

What happened to the old movie houses is very likely to happen to the publishing business over time. Lightning Source (printing on demand) and Ingram (distribution) already offer to help authors take on the publishing risks. What is needed is a means for authors to find editorial and marketing help at a price they can afford.

On a related note, the Freakonomics Blog discusses if the Internet is the Publishing Industry’s Best Friend.

Ethics of book publishing in a developing society

What is the raison d'etre of a book publisher? What are the ethics of book publishing? What is the importance of book publishing to a developing society? In a superb talk titled What Is A Publisher To Do?, Karina Bolasco, a Filipino publisher, dwells on these isses and provokes much thought, very relevant in the Indian context too. She was speaking at the Congress of the International Publishers Association, Berlin (June 21-24 2004). The transcript of the talk is provided below.

What Is A Publisher To Do? by Karina Bolasco

Guten morgen, Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

This is my first time in Berlin but not in Germany as I have been to Frankfurt a good number of times. I have such warm memories of Germans because I was educated in Manila in the 70s by Benedictine nuns, half of whom were still German, In fact, I stayed in their dormitory for four years and remember them distinctly for their firmness and steadfastness, for their sense of equality and discipline. And for being chased back into the dormitory by a German Shepherd every time we were still on pay phones past curfew.

As must be true for most of us, this same education I suspect has helped me decide on a host of moral issues I am confronted with daily, small and big. Those of us involved in the trafficking of ideas, whether in education or media communications, suddenly realize that there really are no small decisions because of the way a teaching method or learning treatise, a film or documentary, an investigative report, or a book impacts on the consciousness of a public. Books have even more power in a perennially developing country like ours where the textbook is still the dominant and sometimes only educational tool, the teacher’s bible she will never doubt or question, much less argue with. Books, coming from traditions of religion and scholarship, have fixity and authority.

Exactly the same article (on the Indian publishing industry), but different authors?

An article in Business Standard (May 28, 2005) titled "Attack of the publishers" by Sangeeta Singh and an article in Asians in Media (June 02, 2005) titled "Attack of the Coffee Table books in India" by Vipin Agnihotri read the same word for word, except for some reordering of sentences.

So who actually wrote the article?

The mystery apart, here's a summary of what the articles actually say, on the export potential of the Indian publishing industry as well as the interest of foreign publishers in translating their books into Indian languages..

The Indian publishing industry today has grown to Rs 7,500 crore, of which exports comprise Rs 460 crore; in 1991, exports stood at a paltry Rs 33 crore. And that’s not all: leading global publishers like Pearson, Macmillan, Penguin, John Wiley, Aelsevier, Springer and Thomson are all contributing to this growing industry.

“It is not for back office work or affordable printing and typesetting rates that we are looking at India. Rather, it is for brain power that India has become a priority base for Macmillan worldwide,” says Richard Charkin, chief executive, Macmillan, and chairman, Macmillan India.  Out of the total 7,000 employees that Macmillan has globally, 2,000 are in India. The company also considers India superior to its other hubs because of the back-end IT support that it gets for its printing activities. However, Macmillan plans to supply more science and educational books out of India because it thinks India has really improved in this area. “Good titles and educational books, especially IT-related, written by Indian authors are becoming popular in overseas markets,” says Ravi Beri, managing director, Macmillan India.

“Out of the Rs 460 crore worth of exports, 51 per cent goes to developed countries including the US, the UK and some European countries,” says Sukumar Das, former president, Federation of Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association of India and chairman, UBS Publishers’ Distributors. And what are the kind of books that are going to these countries? Das says it is mostly new age, coffee table, religious, those related to ayurveda and naturopathy and so on, which are being lapped up in Western countries.

... out of the total titles produced in the country, 45 per cent are in English, which also makes it the third largest producer in English after the US and UK. But this trend may soon change, for foreign publishers are seeing potential in the Indian rural markets and because of this a lot of big titles and educational books are being translated into Hindi and leading regional languages like Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and Malayalam. “For us it is a part of the global policy of moving towards localisation. For instance, in South Africa, we have translated Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom in 12 South African dialects and we want to do something similar in India,” says Charkin of Macmillan.

All the world's speeches, on audio, available for free. Can it really be done? Why not, says Doug Kaye

[via New Media Musings] Doug Kaye, the host of  ITConversations.com has announced details of his new non-profit venture which is an extension of the excellent work he has been doing at ITConversations.com by providing us access to audio recordings of superb conference sessions, lectures and talks that we would never have access to otherwise.

Some of the talks I've really really enjoyed on ITConversations.com are Clayton Christensen's talk on Capturing the Upside, Malcolm Gladwell's talk on Human Nature, Brewster Kahle's talk on Universal Access to All Knowledge and Joseph Chamie's talk on Population and Demographics. Here's how Doug Kaye describes his new venture in his own words.

Every day there are scores or even hundreds of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them.

My new project is to capture (record) all of these presentations, post-produce them, and make them available worldwide for free.

To record tens of thousands of events each year, we will appeal to the social conscience of the worldwide army of podcasters – 10,000 today, and 25,000-50,000 within a year – who I believe will be enthusiastic about the opportunity to give back to their communities and to the world. As a side benefit, these “podcaster stringers” will hone and extend their skills and build their reputations in ways that could benefit them financially and otherwise.

We will build an online “dating service” that will match podcasters with events in their communities. Likewise, we will recruit volunteer writers and producers to create and edit the metadata and descriptions that accompany the recordings. Content will be managed, and quality will be maintained, by a Wikipedia-like system and community. High-volume content will be delivered by a combination of BitTorrent and partners such as the Internet Archive.

We will cover not just IT or even technology, but literally every topic about which someone speaks and another person finds it valuable enough to capture.

You can also listen to an hour long interview with Doug Kaye (mp3, 20.8 mb) where he describes what he did before he started ITConversations and what he plans to do with his new venture.

Doug Kaye's idea really warmed the cockles of my heart. Everytime I go to a speech or a talk, I have been trying to write up a blog post about the speech, apart from trying to get my hands on a transcript of the speech/talk and link to it on my blog. All these posts are listed on my blog, Prayatna, under the category titled Speeches. My friend, Badri, has been doing the same, but he blogs in Tamil on his blog ThoughtsInTamil. 

Some years ago, I used to read a small magazine published in the U.S. called Vital Speeches of the Day which did something similar by publishing transcripts of speeches, but it featured only a few select speeches. I wanted to do something like that in India someday. But what Doug Kaye is proposing to do with minimal cost using Wikis and help from some technology partners, to make available content for free to the end user is amazing. The impact of making available the vast amount of content, on the advancement and spread of knowledge, is going to be huge. Imagine being able to listen to, and learn from the experts and best speakers on any topic. Of course, the signal to noise ratio is likely to be quite low, with lots of speeches and lectures being very poor and only a few that are really good, but the few good ones will automatically bubble up to the top quicky and get noticed.

 

In the Indian context, we need to organise lots of speeches, especially in all  Indian languages, and also record them and disseminate them widely.  A people hungry for knowledge would benefit tremendously. Today, with the widespread availability of CD/VCD players and the growth of FM radio, community radio and the Internet, such audio content can be distributed widely across India.

A people hungry for knowledge

The expansion of the economy in England in the early 18th century resulted in the emergence of a middle class, thirsting for knowledge, and The Spectator, a  single sheet daily newspaper published by two Englishmen Joseph Addison  and Richard Steele  from March 01, 1711 to December 06, 1712 was instrumental in catering to that middle class. In a previous post, I had described the motivation for Addison and Steele to start The Spectator,what they did and how they did it (if you haven't read that post yet, it may be a good idea to read that before reading further).

A similar class of people wanting to be enlightened  is emerging today in India.The identity of this class, a veritable middle class, is defined not by their level of affluence, but by their inability or discomfort in reading in the English language, when compared to their fluency in their native tongue. Most of this class (about 95% of India's population) cannot read, write or speak English at all. While some can read, write and speak English, they are unable to do so fluently enough to be comfortable reading in English.

Their appetite for knowledge has been kindled by the breadth of programming they have been exposed to on television,, but unfortunately television is constrained both by time (slots) as well as the choice of what one can watch being dependent on what the channel chooses to broadcast. Television cannot satisfy their craving for knowledge.

The problem these people face today is that there is little or no hope for them to gain access to knowledge (history, biographies, ideas, science and technology, IT, economics, politics, globalisation, social issues and the like) in their native tongues, since there is very little knowledge-oriented content being published in the Indian languages. What little is published in the Indian languages tends to be pedantic and academic, putting off such readers. The lack of sufficient content in the Indian languages is also one of the main reasons for the PC penetration increasing very slowly. Without knowing English or being comfortable with English, it is quite difficult to use a PC, let alone to use it to access the Internet, where most of the information and content is in English anyway. So there is a total lack of motivation for those who don't know English to use PCs or get on to the Internet.

But it is clear that there is latent demand for knowledge out there which is currently not being met. If knowledge and content can be presented to this large class of people in their native languages, in an easy going style and in a manner they can grasp, they will jump at the opportunity to enrich themselves.

Now you may wonder if  what I've said is just my surmise or if it is indeed really the case. Let me explain why I believe it is indeed true.  In early 2004, my friend Badri and I set up New Horizon Media, a book publishing company to publish knowledge-oriented content in Indian languages, starting with Tamil.  We felt then (and still do) that the way to change society for the better is to increase overall awareness and knowledge levels amongst the people. The reason we decided to do so by starting out with publishing books is simply due to the fact that the book-publishing has an established revenue model with people willing to pay for books, as opposed to the Internet where people are still not tuned to paying for the content they get online, let alone the fact that only a small fraction of the populace have access to the Internet today.

In the past 15 months, we've published around 70 titles in Tamil (through கிழக்கு பதிப்பகம் - Kizhakku Pathippagam, our imprint in Tamil). Some of our best selling titles have been

• அம்பானி - ஒரு வெற்றிக் கதை  - a biography of Dhirubhai Ambani
• அள்ள அள்ளப் பணம்  - a simple introduction to the how the stock market works
• டாலர் தேசம் - a political history of America
• 9/11 சூழ்ச்சி - வீழ்ச்சி - மீட்சி - a book on the 9/11 attack, who was behind it and how it was planned and executed
• பாக். - ஒரு புதிரின் சரிதம் - a political history of Pakistan
• இஸ்லாம் - ஓர் எளிய அறிமுகம் - a simple introduction to Islam in an FAQ format
• ரமண சரிதம்  - a biography of Ramana Maharishi

Addendum: other titles published recently that are amongst our best selling titles include

• Infosys நாராயணமூர்த்தி - a biography of Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys

While we started out with the idea that there was a need for increasing awareness and overall knowledge levels for the betterment of society and that the best way to get started was by publishing knowledge-oriented books, we had little idea of how the readers would respond. We have been pleasantly surprised to find that these books are selling well across the entire state of Tamil Nadu. We priced டாலர் தேசம் - a political history of America, an 850 page hardbound book at Rs. 350 which is at the highest end of pricing in the Tamil market and yet the book has sold over 1000 copies in less than a year's time. We have learnt from booksellers that the buyers of the book on the political history of America and the one on the 9/11 attack ranged from politicians to policemen! What better indicator of the hunger for knowledge.

Annie writing in Known Turf about the views of Sudhish Pachauri (a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, a Hindi critic and writer) and her own, echoes this and feels the Hindi literary world is out of touch with its readers.

The new readers of Hindi books are keen on information. They want to read about globalization and its impact. I write about media and my books sell. People want to read about politics and media. Kameshwar's 'Kitne Pakistan' was a success, because it dealt with the Indo-Pak issue with great sensitivity, and humanity. Readers need an understanding of poetry and sociological issues.

"The reader's world has changed. The writer has failed to notice...

Literature is not a stable thing. It changes. Public tastes change. They are 'constructed' in fact, and have to be 're-constructed', every so often. We need to form public tastes, as well as cater to them. Newspapers no longer do that - we need to, but we can't, without the right media... that is the other crisis.

The crisis is that writers in Hindi don't have a finger on the pulse of the public. That's why there are few big names, as far as the masses are concerned, in either poetry or fiction; because the masses know where to seek a reflection of their needs and ambitions. Writers are not writing about the challenges ahead. They don't know what challenges lie ahead!"

The kinds of books that are turning into best sellers are an indication of the hunger amongst the non-English speaking population to learn about various new ideas, concepts, history, biographies, science and technology, economics, politics, globalisation, the world out there and more. The challenge before publishers and writers is not only to cater to this demand but to produce more content and further stimulate the creation of demand.

The positive impact that The Spectator (see my earlier post) had on English society in the early 18th century is an indication of what is possible if the knowledge hungry are provided with enough ways and means to enhance their knowledge in a manner that they can easily grasp. Just as The Spectator did then, I would like to wager that there is an opportunity before us today to make a major impact in India by unleashing a torrent of knowledge in all Indian languages on receptive readers.

The Indian language publishing industry (offline and online) is headed for a decade of healthy growth with room for lots of  players innovating and experimenting to satisfy a people hungry for knowledge. The advent of blogs has democratised publishing and enabled everyone with an interest in writing to write and reach out to an audience. There is tremedous incentive for people to write and writing talent can now automatically bubble up to the top. The best writers of the future are more likely than not to be active bloggers. The fact that there are over 580 Tamil blogs out there with more starting up each month augurs well for the Tamil publishing industry. I'm sure the same applies to other Indian languages too.

The Spectator - an 18th century innovation in publishing

The Spectator, a single sheet daily newspaper published by two Englishmen - Joseph Addison and Richard Steele - from March 01, 1711 to December 06, 1712 - was a pioneering innovation of its times.  What prompted Addison and Steele to start The Spectator?  How did they go about it?

History Magazine provides the background (emphasis mine).

Each issue consisted of one long essay, printed on a single sheet of foolscap in double columns on both sides. This turned out to be the right format to appeal to the taste of a relatively new affluent class with an appetite for literature, but without the inclination to read lengthy books on the subjects treated in The Spectator.

The Spectator was narrated by the voice of a character calling himself “Mr. Spectator”, a man who describes himself as taciturn, a poor conversationalist who would rather observe and report than get involved in the scenes that he relates. As Mr. Spectator himself explains, “I have often been told by my Friends that it is Pity so many useful Discoveries which I have made, should be in the Possession of a Silent Man. For this Reason therefore, I shall publish a Sheet-full of Thoughts every Morning, for the benefit of my Contemporaries.” Through him we are introduced to his small circle of friends, each of whom is a kind of social-type writ small. Among these are Sir Roger de Coverley, the country squire and Tory foxhunter; Will Honeycomb, the gallant man-about-town; Sir Andrew Freeport, merchant and man of affairs; and finally there is Captain Sentry, the retired soldier.

The advent of the 1700s saw a rebirth of literary culture in England after a perceived slump during the previous century. During the 1600s, English letters seemed to have taken a bad turn. The English Civil War (1642-49) was followed by the closing of the playhouses during the Puritan period. The settling of events with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 did not seem to improve things. A tendency towards crude behavior and dissoluteness seemed to pass from Charles II’s court into English public life generally. However, by the end of the 1600s things began to look up, and especially later during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). The English saw themselves as experiencing a cultural flowering comparable to Rome’s Golden Age during the reign of the Emperor Augustus.

It was fine to say that England was experiencing a literary golden age, but only a privileged few had the education or leisure to participate in this high Augustan culture. All this enlightenment had yet to reach the common people. This role was filled admirably by The Spectator. Part of its success in this lay in the fact that the common people wanted to be enlightened.

The expansion of England’s economy resulted in an increasingly affluent but non-aristocratic middle class. This class seemed to have a voracious appetite for reading material. In previous centuries those who could read tended do so intensively; in other words they read only a few works (mainly religious ones) repeatedly. During the 1700s people began to read extensively, reading many different works. In France, where new books needed to be licensed, there were some 300 legally authorized books published in 1750. By the 1780s that number had jumped to around 1,600. Britain had about 25 periodicals being published in 1700. By 1780 there were 158.

The Spectator was one of the first literary endeavors to make a deliberate effort to appeal to a female readership. As Addison remarked in the issue of 12 March 1711, “there are none to whom this Paper will be more useful, than to the Female World. I have often thought there has not been sufficient Pains taken in finding out proper Employments and Diversions for the Fair ones.” It was part of The Spectator’s mission to remedy this neglect.

Much of this attention to women took the form of a paternalistic moralism that would be little appreciated today. Nonetheless, the women of 1711 were flattered simply to be noticed by a literary culture that had hitherto been content to completely ignore them or treat them as mere objects of male desire.

Credit for The Spectator’s popularity must also go to the beautiful prose of Addison and Steele. Gentle wit and a polished style made even the difficult ideas of Locke and Newton accessible to a reader of average education. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) admitted in his Autobiography that The Spectator was his model for stylish writing.

The introduction to a book of selected essays from The Spectator describes what Addison and Steele the founders of The Spectator set out to do, and how they went about it (emphasis mine).

The Spectator was issued daily— the Friday edition confining itself to literary matter, the Saturday to moral and religious; and it aimed to accomplish even a greater work than its predecessor [The Tatler] had done. More and more attention was given to forming and raising the standard of public opinion in "manners, morals, art, and literature." The editors hoped to meet the needs of all people, but especially the needs of women. Addison realized that through them must come the betterment of society and there the reform must begin.

It is a well-recognized failing with a would-be-reformer to aim above the comprehension of the class he wishes to help; and instead of moving on their plane of thought, to expect them to come up to his. Addison made no such mistake. He knew instinctively the people, descended to their level, and in a light, story-telling form, gave them what their minds were able to grasp. As they were not a reading people, as they were not interested in homilies on right living, nor capable of deep, logical thinking, they must be reached by simple discussions on what occupied most of their attention— the little everyday affairs of life. They had to be led as one leads a child— by arousing the curiosity which eagerly asks, "What did they do next?" To most intellectual men, and certainly to illiterate ones, nothing appeals so strongly as the loves and hates, the joys and sorrows, the successes and failures, and the thoughts of their fellow mortals.

And Addison and Steele based their plan of the Spectator on this knowledge of human longing. They present an imaginary club, the members of which are typical people, and with a thread of narrative skilfully binding them together, suggest the lessons they wish to impart, through the experiences of Ned Softly, Tom Folio, Sir Andrew Freeport, Sir Roger de Coverley, or through the Spectator himself— under which name we find Addison; and the English public read and profited. It is safe to say that no publication with equal circulation, ever benefited more people than did the Spectator.

A Professor of English has this to say of the readers of The Spectator and Joseph Addison, its prime writer (emphasis mine).

It was to the credit of the readers of the Spectator that the demand for the paper increased month by month in spite of the absence of scandal or party strokes. The Saturday papers were usually of a serious cast, suitable as a preparation for Sunday; it was this series of Saturday essays, some of which contained excellent hymns by Addison, that led to his being called "a parson in a tye-wig." Addison divided his readers into the mercurial and the saturnine, and his aim was to find entertainment for both classes, and also to cause the sprightly reader to find himself sometimes engaged unawares in serious thought; and the thoughtful man to be insensibly betrayed into mirth.

What prompted Addison and Steele to start The Spectator and how they did what they did,  is a lesson for our times in India, with a people hungry for knowledge.

A company investigates a journalist for a change

Mathew Buckland writes in the E-Media Tidbits blog on how the shoe is now on the other foot for an investigative journalist who was investigating a company. The company has chosen to go on the attack and investigate the investigative journalist himself.

The company, Elan Suisse Capital, is being investigated by a journalist from the niche South African business website, Moneyweb. It has registered and created a website in the journalist's name, juliuscobbett.com, attacking his credentials.

According to an article on The Media Online, the company published executives' replies to a list of questions by the journalist and posed their own questions back -- giving him a deadline. The site appears in the form of a letter in which the directors of the company focus on the journalist's age, qualifications, and experience. Moneyweb has called the website a "highly focused smear campaign."

If you look at the site  juliuscobbett.com set up by the company before or after having read the article by Julius Cobbett on Moneyweb.co.za that got the company all worked up, it is bound to sow a seed of doubt in the your mind on the competence of the journalist, which is just the objective of the company in setting up the web site.

The article in The Media Online  says,

According to Moneyweb investigations editor Barry Sergeant, the website put up by Elan Suisse – which gave Cobbett until 8am this morning to publicly respond to the list of questions – is a “highly focused smear campaign that attacks an individual journalist and ignores the Moneyweb environment.” Sergeant states that Cobbett works within the investigations unit at Moneyweb, where “all work must go through the normal process of supervision, editing and checking”.

Says Sergeant: “One of the rules in investigative journalism is you play the ball, not the man. We are not playing [Elan Suisse directors] Brett Cormick and John Walters, we are playing Elan Suisse. We want to know where the money is. This elaborate smear campaign does not intimidate us in the least, we take it as a bizarre and underhanded compliment.”

Till now, the journalists had the edge in investigating companies, but now they may increasingly find themselves at the butt of an  investigation themselves. As pointed out by the Moneyweb investigations editor, the publishing brand under which the journlist is writing and how much the readers trust it becomes important in such a scenario.

Amazon can do an eBay to make conventional publishers history

Jeff Jarvis writes about Amazon 2.0: the Content Company, but later corrects himself in response to a comment to suggest that "Amazon is a networking company putting together buyers and sellers, readers and writers (and vice versa)". I think what Jeff means is pretty much what  Peter Redford is proposing with his new book industry business model - browse.net. The question as Redford asks is whether one can automate publishing along the lines of eBay.

Here's what Jeff said.

Amazon was in the distribution business and it did a great job of finding new efficiencies and market shares and customer needs in it.

But distribution has been dethroned as a business. Owning the broadcast tower still makes you money -- but as your audience departs for limitless new competition, it won't grow. Owning a cable franchise is a great monopoly -- but growth is there mostly because you can sell new services, broadband and VOIP, and before you know it, you'll be nothing but the pipe: the next telco. Owning a monopoly newspaper used to be a great business -- until more efficient marketplaces replaced yours and your presses and trucks and Teamsters suddenly looked not like a strength but like a cost. When I went to work for the Newhouses, I got excited at the prospect of working with Random House, which they then owned, but my boss wisely told me it wasn't what a thought -- "it's just a distribution business," he said.

Ernie Miller says it's not a channel. He's right. In fact, I put this the wrong way: Amazon isn't a content company, then, producing content itself. Amazon is not a network. But Amazon is a networking company, putting together buyers and sellers, readers and writers (and vice versa). So what I meant to say is that sometime soon, someone will chose to publish via Amazon directly to the public and skip the middleman formerly known as the publisher. That makes Amazon merely a conduit. One could say that it's about distribution but in the case of digital content, the distribution is meaningless. It's just a place that helps A find B. It's a maven.

What sort of role can Amazon play? If you look at a conventional publishing house today, it does the following: 

1. commissioning and paying for content
2. editing content for publication (pre-press)
3. printing books
4. distribution
5. marketing and promotion

Of these elements, only 1 (choosing what to publish and predicting how much of a success it would be), 3 (how many copies to print in the first run - even this is not likely to be a real risk with the option of on-demand publishing) and 5 (how much to spend on marketing/promotion) involve taking on the risk of publishing. 2 (editorial), 3 (the actual printing) and 4 and even 5 (the actual implementation of the marketing/PR plan) are easily outsourced.

If authors themselves, or any investor(s) that the authors are able to convince, can take on the risks of 1, 3 and 5, then any editorial outfit could do 2, Amazon could step in to do 3 (the actual printing either in bulk or on demand) and 4 and any marketing/PR firm could take care of 5.

Today's publishing houses will then have nothing unique that they bring  to the table. Editorial and marketing talent could operate outside of publishing houses and Amazon would do the rest. Indeed there is a huge opportunity for Amazon to provide the platform to bring together the authors, potential investors and the editorial marketing talent together.

Peter Redford has been thinking of doing just this with his Browse.net idea and Amazon could do this very well themselves, with enough room for a handful of players, considering that the book industry is worth more than US$ 60-70 billion worldwide.

If this model kicks in, it could open up not just the long tail of content, but the long tail of talent as well.

Addendum:
iUniverse.com (funded by Barnes & Noble and Warburg Pincus) and Xlibris.com (funded by Random House ventures), both set up in  2000, have positioned themselves as publishing service providers to authors covering the entire gamut of editorial to printing to marketing services. Amazon.com Advantage also attempts something similar but only focuses on the printing and distribution side of things. Other independent outfits like Lulu and Cafepress also offer what they call self-publishing and focus only on the printing and distribution.

Ammani's blog

I chanced upon Ammani's blog. I must say her quick tales are the most captivating and brilliant innovation in writing that I've seen in a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed reading her quick tales, as well as the traces she reveals of her methods, in the tales of terribly, sleepy, water.

Head over there now! I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

The logic behind Penguin's foray into the Indian language market

According to an article in the Business Standard (May 09, 2005) on Penguin (via Rediff)

Thomas Abraham may not have the literary credentials of his predecessor, David Davidar, but in just a year of taking over as the chief executive of India's largest general interest book publisher Penguin India, he has proved that publishing books, despite the intellectual aura associated with it, is still a business for the hardnosed.

Under the 40-year-old Abraham, for the first time anywhere in world, Penguin would foray into vernacular publishing. The move even received the blessings of the Penguin Group Worldwide's CEO John Makinson who was here in India last month to officially kick-off the venture. Penguin said that its priority is to develop the strongest possible publishing base  in the growth markets of India and China. Something impossible without a presence in the vast local language publishing.

With a turnover of Rs 48 crore (Rs 480 million) in 2004, and nearly a 1,000 titles printed, Penguin is the largest general interest publisher in the country. Yet the average print run for bestsellers in fiction could just be around 15,000 copies, while for serious non-fiction the numbers are well below 5,000 copies. In the fragmented world of Hindi publishing, the number of titles a year can run up to 2,000, but with the lack of a wide distribution system, publishers are confined to selling in a handful of states.

In the Rs 5,000-crore (Rs 50 billion) books market, Hindi titles have the largest share with 28 per cent followed by 22 per cent for English.

Starting with 25 titles a year each in Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam, Penguin expects vernacular titles to contribute 15 to 20 per cent of its revenues in the next five years. "It's a significant step for us. Being in India, it felt incomplete not to reach out to a vast majority of the consumers," says an excited Abraham. A market research commissioned by Penguin pointed out that the boom was in smaller towns. "Sectors like FMCGs, consumer durables and automobiles had realised this very early. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is not riding the wave," says Abraham.

Among the forthcoming titles in Penguin's language publishing programme are an anthology of stories in Marathi; Arundhati Roy's new book of essays, and Shobhaa Dé's most recent blockbuster, Spouse: The Truth About Marriage. The vernacular titles would be about 30 per cent cheaper than their original versions in English. "It's a myth that Hindi books are all priced between Rs 50 and Rs 100. We are entering the higher end of the market, but I find that our books are priced on par with the higher-end vernacular books. You have slim volumes of poetry in Hindi at Rs 150 and translations going up to Rs 295," says Abraham, an avid jazz and 1960s rock music fan.

Penguin says it is not in a hurry to enter the lucrative market for self-help books in Hindi. Translations of bestsellers in this category like Who Moved My Cheese  can notch up sales of nearly 1,00,000 copies in the Hindi belt in a matter of three months. "We would like to begin with books that have a clear differentiator. Fiction and narrative non-fiction is our strength," says Abraham. In its second year, Penguin would look at doing self-help titles Such as B K S Iyengar's Yoga. And when it comes to categories such as personality improvement and business management, Penguin has at its disposal several bestsellers sold under Dorling Kindersley.

Penguin seem to have their logic right. But more importantly, I think there is an increasing hunger for knowledge today amongst the vast segments of vernacular readers, even those who may know to read English, but prefer to read in their natural language, their mother tongue. This is a recent development and is something that has tremendous implications for the publishing industry. I will expand on this thought in a separate post.

See my earlier post for more on Penguin's foray into the Indian market.