Business appears good at the 38th edition of the Chennai Book Fair at the YMCA grounds,Nandanam where the curtains are set to draw on Wednesday.
But more than the money the publishers made at the annual epic event, the focus is increasingly shifting on the money they could make through e-publishing platforms. Though the chatter on the benefits of e-publishing has been growing over the past few years, some believe that 2015 could indeed be the breakthrough year.
Badri Seshadri, publisher of New Horizon Media and also an executive committee member of the Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India (BAPASI) that organises the annual fair, says there is a never before eagerness among publishers to look at e-publishing. More publishers want to reach out to the untapped market of readers who seem to prefer smart mobile devices to books.
Most publishers see the ominous signs: Amazon has started penetrating the Indian market though at this point their Amazon Kindle e-reader has not been enabled to read Tamil books; Google Play and Apple Books are ready to handle Tamil books but have no strategies yet to exploit the market; there is not much clarity on Flipkart’s Flyte; New Horizon Media’s e-reader has been around for a while but is set for a re-launch; Higginbothams has recently launched its HB e-reader; and Bangalore based Newshunt is aggressively building its e-books catalogue in all Indian languages.
Badri says: “From my discussions, it appears that they are now far more receptive than they were an year back. So if a sensible offer comes, they will be glad to take this up.”
Even if it appears logical, the step towards e-publishing is not easy for the Tamil publishing community. Nearly 300 of the 600 plus publishers at the Book Fair run their businesses very frugally. Some of them are just one-man publishing entities managing their publishing for supplementary income or in some cases even pride.
One of the stalls at the Book Fair - >PubSub - offered as a possible solution a cloud-based e-book library platform where publishers could provide their books. Readers who pay a nominal subscription - Rs.10 per day to try or Rs.300 a month - will be able to read as many e-books offered by the service, and PubSub will share revenues with the publishers based on a formula on the books that readers opted in to read.
The service’s founder Arockiasamy Mohanraj said several publishers at the Book Fair had evinced keen interest in moving their books on to the digital platforms. “Most of the publishing in recent years have been happening in some digital format or the other. E-pub format is best suited for e-publishing platform and for delivering it on to different devices. That is where our expertise chips in,” he says. PubSub is set to launch its Android App soon.
Another website that was launched recently that is beginning to gain traction among Tamil book readers is New Horizon Media’s >Mathippurai , which offers serious readers a chance to review Tamil books. “Mainstream media does not feature Tamil book reviews properly. With Mathippurai, we hope to hand over Tamil books for review to serious readers so that they can recommend it to others.” A service similar to >Goodreads , Badri feels that there is a dearth of a good recommendation service for Tamil books online.
Mr.Arockiasamy’s PubSub service also would be able to analyse readers’ preferences like never before and could end up collecting data for a recommendation site.
