With the growth of e-readers, tablet computers and print on demand technology, e-books seem to be a popular trend.
At the ongoing World Book Fair in Delhi, a special enclosure e-book publishers, developers and content providers showcasing their e-books and deliberating with publishers for developing e-books.
A host of publications are already available in English, and now vernacular language books are making their way onto the digital platform.
Rockstand, an e-book and e-magazine application for mobile and tablets unveiled their first regional e-book collection for its readers at the book fair.
“This content alone will entice readers in various cities as well as readers who are on look out for regional content like Hindi, Gujrati, Marathi. They will now have an access to all these books on our platform. In total we are introducing regional content in 18 languages soon,” says Praveen Rajpal, Founder, Director, RockASAP Retail Pvt. Ltd.
The simple application can be downloaded onto android phones free of cost.
“A book when downloaded from our application is for life and even when you do not have internet access on your phone you can read the downloaded book. The application has also special features like night reading mode, various font sizes, making notes and if you are even tired of reading there the application reads out the book to you,” says Rishi M. Jha, Digital Head-RockASAP.
Mr. Jha further adds that the cost of downloading the book is minimum as compared to the real price of the book. “The lowest cost of a book which we had is priced at Rs 1, was a Chacha Chaudhary comic book,” says Nikhil Chandra, Senior Manager, of the company.
The company has also tied up with leading publishing houses in India quite recently. “We are pleased to announce tie ups with 50 esteemed publishers of our country like Roli Books, World Wide Media, Delhi Press, V&S publishers and others,” says Mr. Jha.
With this contract Rockstand have now added more than 1000 books from these publishers to its existing stock of 2 million books. These books include books in English, Hindi and various regional languages.
Some of the famous titles include Chacha Chaudhary, Billoo and Pinki by Diamond Comics, famous novel titled “Tamas” by Bhisma Sahini by Rajkamal Prakashan along few other titles like “Bhagat Singh Ko Fansi”, “Chitralekha” etc.
