Jaya Posts

Journey Towards Selfhood

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

Over a decade ago I did a regular column for Business World. It was on the business of publishing. Here is the original url.

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The Man Within My Head is Pico Iyer’s part-tribute to his “adopted” literary parent, Graham Greene, but also part-travelogue and part counter-biography. The title also echoes Greene’s The Man Within. Iyer initially wrote 3000 pages over eight years to finally reduce it to the 256 pages that were published. It is very clear that this is not a memoir. It is an exploration of ideas that are at the core of Greene’s writings, with a significant one being that of the “burden of displacement”. For Iyer, Greene strikes a chord on many levels. But at the core of it lies the fact that they both seem to share a fascination and a preoccupation with the individual, the sense of displacement in the world of migrants. How do you write about them? How do you live their life? How do you develop a cold detachment and yet experience something so acutely sensitively that it will be transmitted and resonate strongly in the literature written, whether it is an essay or a novel. Beyond these basic literary explorations, Iyer does wonder if it “was only through another that I could begin to get at myself?”

For him Greene could never be a fantasy figure but someone who would also help shed some light on his relationship with his real father. The dad who otherwise remained a distant figure, an academic and a highly respected theosophist, yet who flew half way across the world (from California to England) to meet an asthmatic Pico, after the wheezing son had made an emergency call or who left an emotional message on his son’s phone, after reading Pico’s essay on Greene “Sleeping with the Enemy”, published in Time magazine. It was the last time that Iyer ever heard his father, since he soon thereafter succumbed to complications due to pneumonia. But what distressed him even more was that “it was a shocking thing, “to hear his father sob, especially someone who was famous for his fluency and authority to lose all words”. 

Faith And Fortitude
Greene’s tussle with Catholicism is legendary. Much has been said and written about it. For Pico Iyer, it was the travels with his old school friend, Louis, who had discovered religion that much of Greene’s point of view on religion made sense. “I began to understand how one could be transported-and left in the cold-by the spiritual surrender of another. God, if He exists, has to be something larger, more complex and mysterious than just a headmaster reading rules. Sometimes you know He exists, as with a love, only when He’s very far away and you’re shouting out your rage at Him.” This is probably what prompted Pico Iyer to write in his Time essay that “Greene’s special grace-his curse-was to see ‘the folly and frailty of everyone around him.’ It’s never external devils that undo us, I suggested, but rather the ones that rise up in ourselves and those people who have the power to awaken them within us. Greene was ‘never a truer Christian,’ I concluded, ‘than when forgiving his un-Christian enemies.” But Greene was apparently reluctant, almost ashamed, to be seen being kind; it was only at his memorial service that Muriel Spark revealed that he had sent her a little money every month so that she could go on writing-accompanied by some bottles of red wine, so she wouldn’t feel like a charity case.

Shadow Of The Alter Ego
Pico Iyer is so obviously haunted and possessed by the notion of Greene (but he “never wanted to meet Graham Greene, I often told myself”). To get into the skin of another writer, live their life, but make it your own is astounding. To understand the choices the senior writer made, many times via your own experiences and epiphanic moments is not always easy to write about, although Pico Iyer makes it seem so effortless. At a time when memoirs and creative non-fiction writing is fashionable, to write a memoir that is part-travel part-litcrit part-tribute and part-self-exploratory, is quite a feat. There is no denying the huge influence Graham Greene has had upon Pico Iyer as a writer and an individual. He also shares a trait with Greene, “If you have a dangerous curiosity about the world, or if you’re a writer of sorts, trained to collect observations, you become in such situations, shameless. “There is a splinter of ice,” Greene wrote in his memoir, ‘in the heart of a writer,’ and he needs that sense of cool remove to do his job, as any diagnostician does.” For both the writers, “travel was most a way to see more clearly the questions and shadows it was easy to look past at home”. In a recent interview with Charles Rose, Iyer says that “eight years were spent on this book and yet, I could spend my life doing it. The way you have with a close friend.”

The cover design of the American edition of the book is striking. It has two photographs — the top one is of Greene and the lower one of Pico with his father. The careful arrangement of the book, title and cover and of course the content, shows not only the care with which Pico Iyer has put in thought and effort in to his latest book, but also how very important it is to him to understand, figuratively speaking, “both his fathers”, if you will. The Man Within my Head is a treasure. It is worth buying and savouring.

15 Jan 2021

“It Is An Exciting Age”

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

Over a decade ago I did a regular column for Business World. It was on the business of publishing. Here is the original url.

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Professor Werner Rebsamen always wanted to see “the other sides of the mountains”. His luck came, when he was picked from over 50 candidates to work as a master bookbinder in the US. Binding gilded Bibles in leather required the highest skills. In 1973 he set-up the first in-line printing and hardcover book binding system. He became a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) teaching all aspects of print-finishing.  In his 26 years at RIT, together with graduate students, he conducted many research projects, industry seminars and received a patent for a lay-flat binding method. In 1994, he received the Technical Leadership Award from NAPL, the “Oscar” of the Graphic Arts industry. Being “retired” since 2001, Rebsamen is still active as a trade consultant and as technical director of HBI (Hardcover Binders International). But whenever he finds time, in winter, he enjoys downhill skiing, during other times gardening, sailing and travelling around the world. His slogan: “The one who shares knowledge learns the most!” In an interview with Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, the veteran bookbinder talks about his journey through the trade, the innovations that have taken place over the years as well as the challenges traditional printers and binders face with the advent of e books.

How and when did you decide to enter the trade of bookbinding?
In 1950, when I was 14 years old. That is the age in Switzerland when most of us had to decide on a career. My father was a plant superintendent of the largest trade bindery in the country. He tried to talk me out of becoming a bookbinder, citing “too many headaches etc.” Out of our class of 48, only two were allowed to go to the university (paid by the government) All others were sent to trade schools. After you earn a journeyman degree, you work for a living and attend the evening schools, go for your master. That takes over five years.

You are credited with a lot of innovations in this field. One of the most important ones has been to introduce mechanisation in book-binding in the 1970s.
Most likely, your question makes a reference to setting-up the world first fully automated book manufacturing facility, printing and hardcover binding 70 books a minute. But throughout my career, I have always looked at various tasks and asked myself, is there a better way to do this? I “invented” many items, especially in the manufacture of leather bound Bibles. But the best known may be the idea of RepKover, a lay-flat method of binding. That patent did pay good dividends. (It’s expired now)

What is the total volume of business internationally and in India? What are the key features?
Virtually, every printed product needs to be converted into a marketable form. This is what we call Print-Finishing. I am a technical person, yet you do ask a marketing question. I am sure there are sources, which could give you marketing data about print-activities. These days, skilled craftsmanship is rare. But luckily, our machinery engineers, in close cooperation with binders, have built machinery and systems that make the task of print-finishing and binding much easier. We all have seen it at Welbound Worldwide in Kerala.

When we met in Kerala for the National Book Printer’s Conference, you said you conducted workshops at your laboratory. Were there any constructive suggestions of these engagements between printers, book binders etc.?
Most mistakes in printing or binding are made in the planning stage. So, next to teaching courses for under — and graduate students, we conducted industry seminars. The BMI Book Manufacturers’ Institute (Palm Coast in the US) financed 50 of these three-day seminars. I conducted another 50 plus on print finishing. These, apart from many articles published, generated many good dialogs between the publishing production managers, printers and binders. In these workshops, participants could bind a hardcover book. People still talk about these educational events.

You have been in this business for over sixty years. Now we are the cusp of another major revolution in publishing – a tangle between electronic and print publishing. So what is the future for print?
Our business is changing fast, yet it offers new opportunities, especially with digital printing. Business is changing. Some segments such as the photo books are not growing, they are exploding. I wish I could again be 40 years old; it is an exciting age, full of great, new opportunities.

Where do the challenges lie for binders, printers and publishers?
Many trade bookbinders added digital print equipment. Publishers are catching on systems such as Amazon. In the past, we used to fill warehouses with books. Now, we first sell a book, get paid for it and only then print and bind it, often one at a time. Lightning Source for example prints and binds 50,000 plus such books every day.

How should traditional printers be prepared for the demand in e-books?
As presented, traditional titles did grow 5 per cent from 2009 to 2010. Non-traditional titles grew 169 per cent and those are only the titles listed as ISBN (International Standard Book Number, the unique number accepted globally to denote a commercial book). E-books will affect larger runs of traditional titles. Clearly, this was a trend recognised at the last BMI meeting just a few weeks ago. Now I got an invitation from them to address this topic at their next meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.

Given the new trends, do you think that the book binders business will decline as is being ominously predicted?
Oh no, those who sell binding equipment all over the world, report good business, especially for on demand printing and binding.

15 Jan 2021

The Master Of Many Forms

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

Over a decade ago I did a regular column for Business World. It was on the business of publishing. Here is the original url.

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Some years ago, I read Adventures of Amir Hamza, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqui. It is a translation of the 1871 version of Dastan-e Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami. It was a fascinating experience being able to read a collection of stories that have a strong oral tradition, but were equally strong in their storytelling when reading it in black-and-white print. His collection of short stories for children The Amazing Moustaches of Moochander the Iron Man is a truly scrumpdidlycious experience. The stories are charming (and nonsensical), with just the sufficient amount of repetition of “big words” for little readers. Between Clay And Dust is his second novel (and the inaugural title of Aleph Book Company). A fine piece of writing that took ten years to complete, but as the author emphasises there was little difference from the first draft to what was finally published.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is known as a translator, a novelist, writer of children’s stories. He is also the founder and publisher of the Urdu Project. According to the website, “Urdu Project was created as an answer to the challenges of publishing translations of literary works of Urdu language in the North American market. Traditionally, works from other cultures have always been introduced through translations. But despite the interest in publishing original South Asian writing in English, there is no comparable interest from publishers in contemporary writings from the cultural languages of the region. The publication prospects of the classics face even greater odds; writings commissioned and chosen for translation as part of the colonial enterprise still guide the understanding about Urdu’s classical literature.” Farooqui has also translated some gorgeous poetry for children in Urdu, like the hilarious “Mouse Pickle” by Nazeer Akbarabadi (1732-1830). He is a popular author, who has a Facebook group.

I had met Musharraf Ali Farooqi in early April when he came to Delhi for his book launch. It was his first visit to the city. We had a freewheeling conversation about books, Between Clay And Dust, writing, translations and much more. Here is an excerpt from the conversation.

When we met, you said that “writing is a conscious exercise and that the craft is really important”. This comes through the novel extremely well. The placement of each word, each story frame seems to be well orchestrated. Is the structure of the novel a cross between a good nineteenth century novel and a refined, but meticulous arrangement of Ghalib’s poetry? Do you think you have imbibed some of these rules of writing for your novel?
This is a novel about human relationships. Even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have great novels written about human relationships. The Spanish writer Javier Marias’s work is a fine example of this kind of novel. Ghalib’s poetry also talks of human relationships. Sometimes it becomes complex to the degree of abstraction which is the province of poetry, and Ghalib excels in that. But if I had chosen the path of complexity in describing one emotion or thought, I would’ve been forced to apply it to the whole novel for reasons of uniformity of style. It might have made the novel more abstract but I think that it would have also made it less effective. I did follow the classical novel’s narrative structure but reimagined it in our culture. This is how I will try to explain this experiment.

Does this attention to detail have anything to do with your admiration for the classical narrative structure of novels like The Count of Monte Cristo?
I think classical works such as The Count of Monte Cristo, which is one of my favourite novels, can teach us a lot about the importance of a good structure. Even if the intention is to create a diffused narrative, a consciousness of the intended effect has to be present at some level.

When we discussed Ghalib’s poetry briefly, you commented on how much of his poetry tackles the very ordinary existence of a person; the kinds of love he observes are common and mundane, but the beauty and the power of his poetry lies in his craft, the careful arrangement of his words. Do you think by making a wrestler and a tawaif the protagonists of your novel, you are using very “common” subjects to tell a story, a story that resounds at various levels?
The contours of the relationship that existed between Ustad Ramzi and Gohar Jan took very long for to fully emerge, it is true. The nature of the relationship that grew out of their regard for each other as fellow artists and contemporaries, their concerns as people rooted in their respective cultures of which I only have a secondhand knowledge were all challenges for me as the writer. More than the arrangement of words it was an arrangement of relationships of a certain quality that kept me occupied.

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I found that this novel is extraordinary not just in its storytelling but in the manner in which you have opted to pare it off any geographical indicators. Except for fixing it in a moment of time, immediately after Partition, I find no other references to time or a place. It could be a story unfurling anywhere and in anyone’s life. Why did you opt to do this — of focusing only on the story?
While this novel had to be based in a cultural world, it was not any particularity that it sought to explore. I think this is one of the reasons of its appeal. Everyone is free to imagine the story from within their own world and identify with what is universal in human emotions and passions.

The genteelness with which you tackle the love (or is it admiration) between Ustad Ramzi and Gohar Jan seems like poetry. Is this an intentional technique of infusing a poetic form into prose? I cannot recall any examples immediately, but it struck me while reading the novel that the fluidity with which it moved, and the ease with which I read and wanted to actually re-read passages, was very akin to reading poetry.
In answer to this question, I will go back to my earlier reply about the challenges I faced in describing the delicate relationship between UstadRamzi and Gohar Jan. I think the narrative expresses this consciousness of the sensitivity of their relationship that you experience as a reader.

The horror of Partition and its immediate impact on the people is very well documented. The fact that you do so by not describing the violence, but actually show it by the slow and gradual deterioration in society is impressive. Whether it is the aggression and lack of courtesy shown by Tamami or MaulviYameen to their profession or their elders is exquisitely done. Did you have to delve into a lot of research by actually visiting akhadas and kothas, conducting interviews to show the slow and gradual deterioration of a structure? Or was it armchair research?
 It is all based on research. I have never actually met a professional wrestler. The earlier drafts of this novel were written while I was away in Canada. In the course of writing them, I planned several times to visit an actual akhara but there was no opportunity. And the kothas no longer exist in the form described in the novel. I wrote the final draft of the novel in Karachi and by then the novel was in its present form. I have acknowledged the work on the history of the pahalwans that helped me greatly in understanding the routines and daily life of the pahalwans. As to the deterioration in the value system of a society, I see it daily before my eyes. Radicalism, ethnic divisions, willful ignorance of one’s heritage and the accompanying self-righteousness is there all around us. We can see it in our families, in our friends. It is very painful and makes relationships difficult.

How would you classify your novel? What genre? Would you consider it historical fiction?
I am not clear about it myself. Sometimes I think it is a love story. Sometimes I feel it is a tale of a man’s redemption. I will go by a reader’s definition of the experience.

When we met in April, I had asked you if you wrote parts of the novel in other languages, especially since you are equally at home with Urdu. (Actually I never did ask if you also knew French. Do you?) To which you had replied: “At one point I did think of writing in Urdu, but I cannot claim to be an English-language writer if I cannot write in that language.” But don’t you think that the discipline of knowing another language and having learnt the discipline of being a translator from Urdu to English also informed the writing of this novel? Do you also translate from English to Urdu?
No French. I can barely make out basic sentences. Recently I had the occasion to edit and rewrite parts of the Urdu translation of my children’s stories published in The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man and Other Stories. And I realised that I could still write in Urdu with some facility. I think more than my experience as a translator, my consciousness that the lives of these characters are lives that are expressed in a language which is not English informed the writing of this novel. It was important to me to capture the cadence of the original language, to have a kind of parallel expression for that in English, without it sounding odd. It works a little differently in translation where you have the source text before you.

What exactly did you mean by this book having “broken certain rules”?
I meant that in its structure it has disregarded the modern conventions and reverted to storytelling in the narrative style of the classical novel.

Do you think having written for children and being a professional storyteller for the little munchkins has also influenced your writing for adults?
Every exposure to narrative devices helps. Whether one is doing storytelling for children or adults, giving a lecture, writing a movie script or translating, all these contribute to an understanding of the writer’s art. It also helps to have one Robert B. Wyatt, one of the greatest editors in the world, as one’s literary guardian.

15 Jan 2021

Copyright Law: More Than A Moral Obligation

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

Over a decade ago I did a regular column for Business World. It was on the business of publishing. Here is the original url.

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It was a cozy and warm atmosphere in a bookstore in South Delhi — with plenty of cushions thrown on the floor — that I attended a delightful book launch for children. The book was displayed prominently, along with some fabulous original illustrations done by the author, from which the book illustrator had been “inspired”. I clicked some photographs with my smartphone. The publishers, based in another city, couldn’t attend the event. So, I thought why not mail it to them, they are fraternity. Soon, a newsletter popped into my mailbox from the same publisher, with a lovely write-up of the book launch accompanied by my photographs, but with no acknowledgement given to me. I was disappointed. 

After pondering over it, I decided to bring it to the publisher’s notice. To me, it was the principle of recognising the IPR (intellectual property rights) of the creator and giving due credit that I felt was at stake here. This was the reply I received, “So sorry. It was a slip up as I had said that you should be acknowledged. But since that is not the usual practice — simply because no one had asked — it was overlooked.” An apology received and accepted. I did not stop at that. I requested that in the next newsletter it should be rectified and on the blog, the photographs uploaded should go with credits. To explore larger issues surrounding copyright, and for publishers in general, management of copyright is a very important part of their business. In May 2012, the Indian Parliament passed a few amendments to the Copyright Act. (It is still a bill, at the time of writing this column.) A victory to a large extent for the music industry, but it has made very little difference, so far, to the publishing industry. Plus, the debate surrounding Clause 2(m) of the Indian Copyright Act is still an open chapter. As per the clause, a book published in any part of the world can easily be sold here. Thus, diluting the significance or infringing upon an exclusive Indian edition. The Parliament Standing Committee investigating the pros and cons of Clause 2(m), made a “forceful recommendation” for its amendment, but it was not included in the bill. So the HRD Minister has referred it to an NCAER expert committee constituted. However, another amendment relevant to the publishing industry has been the increase in copyright term for photographs. “This will make using older photographs impossible without hunting down the original photographer,” says Pranesh Prakash, a lawyer and copyright expert and programme manager at Centre for Internet and Society. “So far, things have worked well because sepia-tinted photographs have generally become part of the public domain. But now, only photographs by photographers who died before 1951 are part of the public domain. This has shrivelled up the public domain in photographs since it is even more difficult to trace the photographer (and date of death) than to estimate the age of a photograph, determining whether a photograph is in the public domain is laden with uncertainty. The use of historical photos in books (and Wikipedia) will be badly affected.” Having been a publisher for years, I tend to be very careful about issues involving copyright. Dig deep and you will find anecdotes that illustrate the crying need for understanding copyright issues. For example, an illustrator submitting files to a reputed art director could be told that the illustrations are not up to mark. Unfortunately, when the book is published, the ‘new’ illustrations are pale imitations of the original line drawings submitted by the illustrator. Or for that matter, a playwright being asked to create a script, but is never acknowledged or even paid the royalty due since the director believes that the core idea for the play is hers. ‘The playwright merely gave it a form’ is a common retort. Or, a couple of editors discovering their original research (and highly acclaimed globally) has been blatantly plagiarised by a well-known writer and published by an equally prominent publisher. Despite having marshalled all the necessary evidence, the editors are unable to file a case, since the court fee is a percentage of the damages sought and is beyond their reach. So, these cases stagnate with no redressal and the creators are left frustrated and angry. The core issue is, how many professionals in the publishing eco-system actually know what is copyright or how to exercise their rights? After all, it is only a concept, albeit a legal one, which gives the creator of an original work exclusive right(s) to it for a limited period of time. Establishing and verifying the ownership to copyright is a sensitive issue. A good example of how an organisation can facilitate, disseminate, inform and empower a literary community on IPR and related topics is the Irish Writers Union. According to their website, it is “the representative organisation for one of the major stakeholders in any discussion about copyright: Irish authors. While we understand that copyright legislation might be a barrier to innovation in certain industries, the IWU believes that any change to copyright law must be managed in such a way as to ensure that no damage is done to Ireland’s literary activity. …literature earns hard cash for Ireland. Both in the form of its contribution to the €2bn annual gain from cultural tourism and in the considerable revenues deriving from the success of sales of Irish works, Irish publishing and writing is an activity that should not be jeopardised by any legal change that weakens the value of copyright ownership to the creators of original literary works. …We note that if anything, copyright law in regard to literature should be strengthened to protect rights holders.” As Shauna Singh Baldwin, a Canadian-American novelist of Indian descent, comments upon the significance of copyright in an e-mail conversation with me, “The breath of the individual creator, his/her imagination and speculation gives life to a work of art. To create something new, you take ideas from many sources, recontextualise them, find unexpected connections between them, and create something new — and beautiful. If we continue to be ashamed of our own imaginations and so fearful of mistakes that we must copy the tried and true, we will never create, only innovate.” 
As for the rejoinder and photo credits I had requested for my photographs, the publisher implemented it immediately. And I was glad.

15 Jan 2021

The Economics Of Electronic Content

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

The following article was probably published around 2013 but the date of publication is not mentioned on the original url. Nevertheless, here it is.

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A few weeks ago educational researcher and professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK, Dr Sugata Mitra won the $1 million TED grant for his ‘Hole-In-The-Wall’ project. It basically promotes the concept of school in the cloud (web) relying on the premise that in the absence of supervision or formal teaching students will discover good content, share, discuss and teach others too. It is based on his experiments conducted in 1999 at Kalkaji, an urban slum in New Delhi. Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering the slum, installed an internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other. Such is the nature of technology that children relatively unexposed to the internet and computers were able to operate and learn to work with the technology.

The outcome of the experiment points towards one direction – the need for availability of reliable and relevant content. The importance and demand of good and reliable content in education is evident in the alacrity with which SmartClasses were adopted in India. The vendors, who were keen to sell computer hardware and claim they have “content for KG till 12 Std”, had a strong USP -– make the information electronically available would help their students in learning. According to a proposal letter from a Delhi-based vendor says they offer to set up SmartClasses and a Knowledge Centre and they have done so in over 10,000 schools across India. Recently there has been some information circulating that this large firm responsible for introducing smart classes is floundering since the veracity and quality of the content it offers is questionable. Schools are getting out of these alliances after 2-3 years of getting into the partnerships.

The ‘E’ Landscape
Sure, the market for e-content is growing. However, to get a definite figure for the size of the edu-content market is difficult. Perhaps these numbers and facts will help us imagine the landscape and possibilities in the ‘E’ economics. The literacy rate for the Indian population is 74.02 per cent (2011), up by 9 per cent from the previous decade. Of this 40 per cent of the population is below the age of 30, where 200 million children are under the age of 18 and 69 million of them reside in urban areas. The book market is estimated to be between Rs 10,000-12,000 crore in value with over 18,000 publishers doing business in the country. and you will perhaps even plan on setting up shop for e-content. Moreover, the publishing industry is growing at a rate of 30 per cent as per recent Ficci estimates.

Now, let’s go over the statistics on the electronic part of the content. The O’Reilly Global eBook Market’s (Feb 2013) says the ebook market in India is expected to be less than 1 per cent of the total book market, though this too is expected to grow by 20-25 per cent in the next 2-3 years.

Almost all of the online educational content and digital books are currently in English. According to PrintWeek India “In the last five years, digital printing industry has grown by approximately 21.6 per cent and over the next five years it is expected to expand by 23.6 per cent. There is a growth of 73 per cent in textbook printing in the last five years in India.”

The government of India is leading several initiatives to promote digital literacy and provide access to digital content at school and college levels. National-level missions such as the Rs 4612 crore ($859 million) National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT) have been introduced. The NME-ICT is working in collaboration with other related missions and schemes—National Knowledge Network, Scheme of ICT in Schools, National Translation Mission, and the Vocational Education Mission. The idea behind the initiative, according to a report published in The Hindu (7 January 2009,http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200901021501.htm), is to work towards creating personalised and interactive knowledge module for students.

India’s education sector, moreover, is set to increase to Rs 602,410 crore ($109.84 billion) by FY15 due to the expected strong demand for quality education going by a recent report issued by India Ratings, a Fitch Group Company. Indian education sector’s market size in FY12 is estimated to be Rs 341,180 crore and the market for content forms a key chunk of this pie. The sector grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 16.5 per cent during FY05-FY12. The higher education (HE) segment was at 34.04 per cent ($17.02billion) of the total size in FY10 and grew by a CAGR of 18.13 per cent during FY04-FY10.

The Fitch report also said that it has a stable outlook on the Indian education sector which includes both school and higher education. Hence it is not surprising that content service providers and publishers future strategies are based on how to capitalise this sector. For instance, in Jan 2013 it was announced that HarperCollins India would be launching a new educational division in India. Collins India in a press note said the English-language schools textbook market in India currently stood at more that £150m, more than the market size in the UK, and is expected to grow further. Similarly Wiley India launched its Authorship Development Roadshow to get quality content in Bangalore and Chennai.

Now link all this to the demand from thousands of schools for e-content in India, and perhaps you will immediately think of registering a company and learning the ropes of the business to supply content. And competition already exists in the form of the education sector (K-12, higher education and academic) who were the early adopters of e-learning and e-content have company — the trade publishers too have joined the ‘E’ game.

But it’s not just competition that could prove a bugbear to your prospective firm. The vendor should find out if the content he is providing to schools is legitimate and importantly if it is suitable to the recipients.

With the tablet and smartphones boom in India, convergence is inevitable. However offering good content then becomes a prerequisite. As Thomas Abraham, managing director with Gurgaon-based Hachette India says, “Where trade (non academic books, literary fiction, self help, mind, body and spirit lists) books are concerned, 90 per cent of revenues come from the straight text flows of narrative fiction or non-fiction — the printed page moving on to the screen.”

Content Is Still King
One of the five publishing predictions for 2013 made at international publishing conferences at the start of the year is reiteration of the fact that content will be king. This is the future of publishing. If content falters or is under-par, it will not translate into a sustainable business model. It does not matter if the service provider is a trade publisher for fiction and non-fiction books or an education publisher for creating textbooks, everyone has to focus on creating good, reliable and authentic content.

Today there are slight shifts noticed in the nomenclature being used to offer content. Well-established publishing firms whose focus is education prefer to no longer be identified as publishers instead as educational service providers. Others will prefer to use terms like “content management” and “curriculum development”. Trade publishers, whose prime focus in their children’s list is to create fiction and non-fiction, recognising the need for offering reliable and branded content in educational institutions are now expanding their lists to include grammar books, elocution speeches and quiz books written by “branded” names or those who are willing to lend names. Everyone recognises the market and its potential, so it does make strategic sense to tweak existing lists and offer it in any format: print, digital or audio. Or as was said at the ‘If Book Then’ conference, Milan (19 March 2013) “data is the new oil of xxi century”.

15 Jan 2021

Good Lit Versus Saleable Lit

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

Over a decade ago I did a regular column for Business World. It was on the business of publishing. Here is the original url.

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Some of my happiest childhood memories are sitting curled up in a chair and reading. I read and read. I bought books, I was gifted books, I inherited books. My brother and I browsed through encyclopaedias, books on art and museums, read fiction, non-fiction, and anything else in between. Call it by any name, but the pleasure of holding and reading a book was tremendous. In fact one of the canvases I painted was of my brother reading a Leslie Charteris “Saint” novel, borrowed from the library its red jacket visible while he lies on the bed absorbed in reading. We read voraciously. We read whatever came our way. I don’t recall anyone telling us that books were strictly by age or category. We liked a good story. Period.

Today it is different. In June 2013 award-winning German writer, translator and Publisher at Carl Hanser Verlag, Michael Krüger, said in Publishing Perspectives, the daily e-newsletter on publishing, “I only know there are good and interesting books, and bad ones. …Since book publishing became a mass-market business, the quality level is constantly sinking. But there are still very good books around, in every country! The problem is that people can’t get them because they are hiding.” Publishers are increasingly more careful about commissioning titles and work a great deal on the packaging and promotion of the books. Always with an eye on the market, reaching out to the regular customers and trying to connect with new readers. For instance titles for children are being classified according to age, to make it easier for customers to find authors.

New imprints are being launched especially for young adult literature (it is a booming market segment) – Inked (Penguin Books India), Red Turtle (Rupa Publications), Duckbill (Westland) and Scholastic Nova. The idea is to always have a pulse on the market. Some of the genres that are popular are commercial fiction, children’s literature, non-fiction, self-help, business and then there are new lists appearing – young adult/ tweens, cross-over titles, and speculative fiction.

Jaspreet Gill, a marketing executive who wandered into the industry a year ago, (and the publishing bug has bitten him) says “It is not an industry for the most part driven by Editorial (I thought it was), or the quality of content. The whole trade is driven by sales. The worth of a book is judged by how well it can be sold, or how much the author can spend and how well he can be utilised for marketing. This is also, with all due respect to them. They are smart salesmen, but that is all that they are, selling commodities, not presenting ideas, ideologies, and good literature. I sincerely believe that the reason for success of the authors of commercial fiction is not the quality of their content, but the price of the book, and visibility they are able to get at the retail stores. They are also clever marketers, and know how to sell their products to people.”

Somak Ghoshal, former literary fiction commissioning editor with Penguin Books, acquired some fine literature (Chitra Bannerji Divakurni, Anjan Sundaram, Neamat Imam and Shazaf Fatima Haider) says, “Commercial fiction sells. The print runs are staggering. The success of these titles allows the firm to acquire literature that in turn develops the brand of the firm. It is a symbiotic relationship.”

It raises the (eternal) question of what is good literature? What sells? And why? Does good literature equal saleable literature? Naveen Kishore, Publisher, Seagull Books, Kolkata (with offices in New York and London), offers an explanation “Like everything else, we need to question the ‘market’. After all, it cannot exist in a vacuum. To put it another way: without content — largely implying the labour of the author, the effort of the publisher and all the other players including the vital function that a translator plays — where would the market be? What would it ‘showcase’? What would it sell? And let us make no bones about the fact that ‘content’ is not simply and only about a certain swiftly ‘saleable’ kind of book. It is also about the arts and literature and culture and philosophy and thought that go into making us human. Again if we persist with our interpretation of what the market wants we will end up by not publishing 90 per cent of these subjects. What kind of a future will that be? It is in this context that the market has a responsibility and a proactive role to play. ‘It’ (the market) cannot be lazy about this and merely sit back and expect only the books that make the grade according to ‘its’ standards be accepted! The market has to learn to cater, feed, nurture tastes for literature that do not necessarily extend to the millions . . . always remembering that the first Kafka text only sold 800 copies! If the market had behaved as it does now we would never have had a Franz Kafka! It is in this context that I suggest that the market needs to find you.” Sterling Lord, literary agent to Jack Kerouac, Ken Casey, Gloria Steinem, and Berenstains reports in his memoir Lord of Publishing of Ted Geisel, editor, Random House who published the Berenstain bear stories that he insisted on the story being a page-turner. But it “wasn’t only the story that Ted focused on; he cared about the title page, the type, the paper, every phrase, every word, every rhyme, and every drawing.” The intervention of the editor created a book that would sell and launched a new author into the market. By March 2009, nearly fifty years after publication, The Berenstain Bears Go to School had sold 3,520,554 copies in North America alone.

Of course the notion of what constitutes “good” literature is subjective but it is obviously a challenge that plagues the industry worldwide. Is it literature that is fine, complex, well-crafted and tells a good story that will survive over a period of time or is it literature that sells phenomenally well and caters to the mass market? Can literary tastes even be defined? Eric Hobsbawm says it well in Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, “… much good new writing is published that would never pass the profit threshold set by the accountants, because of non-market decisions.” No one really knows. Is it the author that creates a market with their storytelling or does the market create an author? Publishing continues. New authors are discovered. New readers emerge. The cycle continues.

As I file this column, it is announced that Penguin Books India has signed a two-book deal worth an estimated Rs 1.25 crore (approx $210,700) with Ravi Subramanian, popularly referred to as the John Grisham of banking. This follows close on the heels of Amish Tripathi, of the Shiva trilogy fame, who has inked a deal worth Rs 5 crore (approx $843,000) with Westland for his next series.

15 Jan 2021

National Book Promotion Policy: Where Are We?

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

The following article was based on a presentation I did at FICCI ( Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry ) in 2011. The paper was published on BusinessWorld. The original link is here. I am also copy-pasting the text below.

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The demand for books is being propelled by India’s 8.8 per cent growth in 2010 and the reading habits of the burgeoning Indian middle class. Publishers forecast India will be the biggest English language book-buying market in the world. Today, it is the third largest after the US and the UK; but ahead of major Asian competitors such as China and Japan. The good news is that India is poised on the cusp of a great educational revolution. Today, if one averages seven textbooks per literate student, the agencies of the Indian government print 1.8 billion books per year. Plus another two billion exercise notebooks. The downside however, is that more than seven million children in India drop out from schools. And all they need is a book. For that to happen, these books have to be created. In India, the government has made a commitment of $7.56 billion every year for a period of five years and has set aside $3.33 billion for 2010-11. Today, the demand drivers for education are based on the fact that it’s a young nation which has a population of 400 million between the age group of 5 to 24. Of this, 220 million attend schools and colleges. The “guesstimate” for the Indian book publishing is US$1.9 billion. Of this, educational books and higher educational books dominate 60 per cent of the market share. Some of the other prominent segments or lists are trade/fiction, business and dictionaries. There are 19,000 publishers in the country. Trade books account for 30 per cent of output by value (at Rs 4,200 crore), of which local publishing makes Rs 700 crore. Trade in English-language publishing-including fiction, non-fiction, and textbooks-is equivalent to Rs 9,800 crore of the total value of Rs 14,000 crore.

These are only some of the statistics that are being bandied about the Indian publishing industry. A publishing eco-system in any territory is vast and complicated. The verticals in it are not as clear as in any other industry, but this unique interdependence between different departments in a publishing firm is also its strength. Editors are dependent upon sales and marketing departments to keep them informed about reading trends in the market and bookstores and if there is any growing demand. Similarly, editors are able to commission and select manuscripts that not only cater to existing demands, but anticipate and predict future trends. In order to allow for such experiments to happen, editors and their publishing houses are dependent upon decisions like the recent Government of India’s draft National Book Promotion policy. Policies, such as these, help in creating and sustaining new markets which in turn, help in the growth of the industry.

For this first article in a series devoted to the publishing industry (domestic and international), its various aspects and the business thereof, I will focus on the National Book Promotion Policy. There are some good ideas enshrined in the policy that are bound to have a positive impact on the industry. For instance, strengthening the library movement; making books available for the differently-abled, women, children and in the rural areas; collecting authentic statistics about books and publishing; promotion of reading habit; fostering a translation programme; offering reasonable postal rates and elimination/reduction of duties and finally, capitalising upon technological changes.

In order to be effective and link publishers with the intended readership, there must be a census of the book industry in India, beginning with who is originating, to who is writing, and who is reading. If this is undertaken first, it will determine everything else. Equally, we need to study what our national institutions such as the National Library, NBT, NCERT, Raja Ram Mohun Roy Foundation, Sahitya Akademi etc. achieved in all these years. Similar initiatives like this have been implemented with a fair degree of success in countries such as Australia, Singapore and Canada. Australia has a grants system at national and state levels and they have proved very beneficial. Writers compete for grants under criteria that do not exclude emerging writers. In India, project grants awarded on merit and timelines (for the author) would greatly assist the development of works and writers.

The Canadian Council is one example of where this has been achieved successfully. I will quote (with permission) an excerpt from an e-mail that I received from Shauna Singh Baldwin. My experience with a great National Book Promotion Policy that works is the Canadian System. The Canada Council is an independent agency that makes grants to writers from tax money. I have served three times on the grant juries for writers, and found them fabulously objective. They have three grants — to emerging, mid-career and advanced writers. The Canada Council administers the Governor General’s prizes (like the Sahitya Akademi) for the past 75 years and having served on that jury in 2008 and read 137 novels submitted by publishers, I can tell you GG award money is hard won. The Canada Council also funds publishers and what is really important as an example to India: translators in other countries. For instance, my novels were published in Dutch by de Geuss in Holland under a grant from the Canada Council. The Canada Council pays for writers’ honorariums at readings – not a lot, but enough to promote the concept of respect for the artist. As you know, if you don’t pay for work, you won’t value it.

It is a combination of various kinds of initiatives that will strengthen the publishing eco-system in India and make it an integral part of the global publishing industry. Different aspects of this industry will be discussed in subsequent articles.

15 Jan 2021

Interview with Andre Schiffrin ( 21 Nov 2011)

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

On 21 Nov 2011, Business World published an interview I did with the legendary publisher, Andre Schiffrin. Here is the original link. I am copy-pasting the text below too.
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Paris-based publishing luminary Andre Schiffrin is renowned not necessarily for the writers he has published (Chomsky, Foucault, Hobsbawm, etc.), but also for his successful business models in publishing. Jaya Bhattacharji Rose caught up with him to discuss the present, past and future of books. Excerpts:

You have been in publishing for over 60 years now. How have things changed?
The role of the reader has always been important, but never as much as now, with the arrival of digital publishing and big chains. The challenges are mostly negative, especially for independent publishers. Google and Amazon are creating a monopoly, destroying the bookstore and the paperback. (E-books are as cheap as paperbacks.) With Amazon venturing into direct publishing, the future looks bleak for maintaining the publi-shing models of the past, where there was a stress on quality, and on nurturing new writers and thinkers. A good modern-day example worth emulating is what MIT is doing with its curriculum. It is an important model where the output is available for free.

Can you elaborate on the challenges, especially for independent publishing?
Publishing is a macrocosm of society. Publishers need to take a risk and experi-ment with ideas and authors. Unfortunately, more than ever before, there exists a market censorship. Big publishers are being selective and, at times, conservative about what they publish. Secondly, the political decision is paramount in helping independent publishers. For instance, in Germany fixed pricing of books or resale price maintenance is important as it keeps independent bookstores alive. Publi-shers and importers of books in German have to fix a price for each book published or imported. Fixed price means all retailers will initially offer a book for sale at the same price, in whatever period of the year.

A third challenge is distribution networks. A good distribution network is the key for their survival. For example, in France, over a thou-sand independent stores have come together to share information and help each other. This network works well. So, you can order a title at any bookshop and within 24 hours it is delive-red. Finally, the role of the author in suppor-ting the independent publisher is significant.

How do you look at social media and the spaces it allows?
I am not against technology, but social media spaces are limited. It is not always easy to locate and discover, and engage with opinion makers there. It is important to be printed, published and disseminated in the traditional manner. A recent example is Time For Outrage, written by 93-year-old Stephane Hessel. Published by a small French publisher in Montpellier, and priced at a mere e3 — it has sold over 3.5 million copies so far.

How have troubles in the US and the Eurozone impacted publishing?
Publishing in these territories is under-going a transformation. The growth of publishing firms is mainly due to M&As. But the most significant impact for Indian publi-shing is in the growth of printing. Publishers from these territories seek ways of being cost-effective, by outsourcing printing to India— and they have been doing so for a while now.

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 21-11-2011)

15 Jan 2021

Brad Stone “The Everything Store”

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

On 8 Nov 2014, I wrote an article in BusinessWorld about the recently released book by Brad Stone on Amazon called The Everything Store . The link to the original article is here. I am also copy-pasting the article below.

Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone’s ‘The Everything Store’ is about Jeff Bezos and his baby, Amazon. After the book was published, Bezos distanced himself from the book. Significantly his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, gave the book a one-star rating on Amazon saying it contains “numerous factual inaccuracies” and is “full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction”. The book is based on a number of interviews that Stone conducted with Bezos, his staff and ex-colleagues to get a sense of the firm. What is very clear after reading the book is that Amazon is significant because it has the advantage of being a first mover, it is a game-changer, certainly for publishing.

There are three points worth considering:

  1. Bezos was the first to exploit the potential of the internet and collaborate with start ups with new ideas. For instance, his acquisition of a firm that specialised in digital books, with the .mobi format, resulted in his insistence on making the files uploaded on Kindle to be DRM protected.
  2. He knew that sales ranks would be like a drug to authors, so he insisted that it change whenever a new order came in: thus influencing the gradual shift in publishing houses laying more emphasis on marketing and promotional activities than on editing and commissioning. (Whereas it cannot be an either/or situation, it has to be a combination.)
  3. Finally Bezos’s famous analogy of comparison that publishing firms are like gazelles and Amazon is a cheetah. This belief was integral to his strategy in agency pricing. He had to persuade publishers to give him the digital files to the books they published. (It required time since many publishers discovered that they did not have the rights to the digital formats from the authors.) He was convinced marking the books at such a low price was rational since there were no printing and warehousing costs involved — a misconception that has come to be associated with the entire system of publishing. But Amazon is able to achieve much of this due to the ‘technological moat’ it has dug for itself, that is, of low margins. It ensures that with the creative vision Bezos and his team have they are able to expand their business into uncharted domains, effectively keeping competition out.

At BookMark, the B2B space for publishing professionals at the Jaipur Literature Festival there were a number of fascinating conversations about the business. Most significantly the resistance in original publishing to digital and the disruption it would cause in the publishing ecosystem was no longer making news. The presence of technology to facilitate, produce and disseminate books is now an accepted norm. It is here to stay. It was interesting to see how the industry was responding to the rapid changes taking place in the environment, necessitating a rapid pace of evolution by adapting and adopting new methods.

Take Penguin Random House CEO John Makinson’s comment at the event, for instance. The coming together of Penguin and Random House was a “strategically delivered merger” since it was the only combination that changed the game, said Makinson. He was confident that the industry would consolidate itself in a bit of time. At a time when the global industry is reeling from the massive presence of Amazon, the formation of Penguin Random House catapults it to the first position with 25 per cent share of the global market. In October 2013, Jüergen Boos, Director, Frankfurt Book Fair, at the opening of the fair, warned that companies like Amazon, Apple and Google were “logistics magicians but are not publishers”. It stands to reason since online recommendations are purchase based and not behavioural. It does not tell you what people want to read since much of the online purchases are for gifts.

There has to be serendipity in publishing. It is the smarter way of keeping the ecosystem alive, creating newer readers and shifting away slightly from being only a writer’s space.

The overwhelming presence of Amazon, Google, and the iBook store of Apple and closer to home, Flipkart, has resulted in the “disturbing dominance of content” as John Makinson put it. It is inevitable that online retail platforms will require large volumes to remain sustainable. They are not discerning and curate content as booksellers are known to do with their stocks. So, it is fairly common to find on these websites second hand, and out-of-print books, or those titles that belong to backlists but are not readily available. In fact, Paul Yamazaki of City Light Booksellers and this year jury member, DSC South Asian Literature prize is clear that he will retain titles on his shelves that are worth recommending, not necessary that it is the latest title creating waves in the media. City Light Books, is a landmark independent bookstore and publisher that specialises in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It was established by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin and synonymous with the ‘beatniks’.

Of late, publishers have been a worried lot since their traditional forms of publishing are not giving them the benefits they have been used to; in addition the sales of ebooks have plateaued, falling far short of the forecasts. The reliance on frontlists is making publishers an anxious lot since author brands only work for a limited time and within a given framework. For instance, commercial fiction authors are a brand unto themselves, a specific market who only read the specific author, but do not guarantee sales with every title. Ever since publishing houses were established they relied on a formula of 80:20 where 20 per cent was reserved for experimentation or the mid-lists, to discover and nurture new writers, which sometimes became the bedrock of the future for the firm. This is now happening less and less. Instead it is easier to offer authors a contract once they have proven themselves in the market. Many new voices are being discovered via the self-publishing route and traditional firms recognising the business potential of this are offering self-publishing services. This is in trade publishing. But even in academic publishing, technological advances and the presence of agents such as Apple, Google and Amazon have had an impact. For instance, material in a digital form for classroom and assisted teaching, teacher resource material and even the rent-a-textbook model, like Coursemart, have proved to be successful.

Among some of the other responses to the changing environment were that established businesses know the only way forward is to recognise that their expertise is limited; collaborations with new ideas or new startups is the only way to keep the business afloat; exploring a subscription service to deliver books/content to users/customers as indicated by the tie-up between Scribd and HarperCollins; looking to create a market beyond English-language readers (since it is a limited market), moving beyond viewing English as a functional, operational and legal language, translating content and creating a base of readers in the mother tongues to increase readership. The fact is that when markets are volatile and competing forces are at play and with 40 per cent of the population online it is not easy to forecast what will happen in the near future, save that a certain amount of realignments will happen through mergers and acquisitions, new systems will evolve and it will be survival of the fittest — big or small, who knows for now!

15 Jan 2021

“Chain Reactions” by LEGO and Klutz, Scholastic

15 01 , 2021 No Comments

This is the best of everything — a happy and contented child playing with her LEGO bricks to create models that explain chain reactions. It is also the best of best brands that are extremely familiar with what it takes to nurture a child and develop their cognitive skills — Scholastic, the biggest children’s publisher in the world; Klutz, an imprint of Scholastic, that specialises in activity-driven books and of course, LEGO.

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