Empire Strikes Back

Author Andrew Keen has challenged book publishers to fight back against the "tyranny" of free content. Speaking at The Bookseller's conference "Digitise or Die", Keen warned that publishers and other intermediaries were being pushed out of the new economy by the prevailing "northern Californian libertarian mindset" that demanded everything for free.

Jason Hanley, strategic development partner at Google Book Search, stressed that digital would most likely supplement rather than displace existing revenue models, with multiple rather than one dominant model developed. He referred to statistics which suggested that 80% of users searching on Google were looking for book content, adding, "publishers do see results". Rather the "digitise or die", Hanley said the conference should be titled, "digitise".

Read the full piece...

Never before have so many avenues been available to content creators to reach the masses. It's not the consumers or the creators who have much to fear; it's the publishers.

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Free eBooks = Profit

Via Masnick, another data point that seems to suggest that giving away your books for free via the Internet really does boost sales of hard copies.

Neil Gaiman, who was part of Harper Collins experiment with giving away free ebooks, discovered (like so many others) that giving away the free ebooks helped increase sales. And, of course, it wasn't just for the one book that was offered for free, but across all of Gaiman's works. The other bit of information is that, as we expected, HarperCollins found that many people were not at all happy with all of the restrictions it put on the ebooks (including that you had to read it on their website rather than download it

Sameera

From the India Today, the story of a magazine with a difference.

In a world driven by cut-throat competition, what does one make of a publication that wants to sell less? That is the claim being made by Sameera, a Bhopal-based niche magazine.

Yet, it is not as if the magazine is aiming for a diminishing readership. What it really wants is to develop the habit of sharing among people to help save the environment.

This unique approach to magazine circulation is guided by the fact that Sameera is perhaps the only magazine of its size in the country to be printed on handmade paper.

Read India in the Economic Times

Another such initiative by Pratham, Read India, aims to inculcate the 3R's among children across the country — reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic. It focuses on the introduction of 'learning to read' (and arithmetic ) activities in schools. This includes simple interventions like incorporating a reading period aimed at improving fluency in reading to teaching the use of alphabets.

"Read India is a focussed campaign and we have received excellent feedback. We have been using various teaching-learning materials besides reading cards and, as a result, many students who struggled earlier have now learnt to read. In fact, we are now moving from learning to read to reading to learn," elaborates Madhav Chavan, founderdirector , Pratham.

Read the full article at ET.

POD for University Presses

This is from the Creative Commons blog:
ETC Press has just launched as an "academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint." The project is affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is in partnership with Lulu.com. When authors submit their work to ETC they retain ownership of it but they also must submit it under either an Attribution-NoDerivativeWorks-NonCommercial or an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. ETC press then posts the works to Lulu.com where they are available for purchase in its hardcopy form, or free download. While the project focuses specifically on writing about entertainment technology, it is easy to see ETC's model scaling to publishers of other topics and genres.This points to a range of possibilities for Indian universities too. Universities or departments within them can now publish their reports and journals on an "as-needed" basis without having to bother about upfront costs or unsold copies. The potential is enormous.

Narnia speaks Hindi now

For those who are worrying about the recession, here's a whole new (well, almost) sector opening up. The just set up National Translation Mission requires 8,000 translators, 2,000 copy editors and 2,000 evaluators to man it, with Rs 99 crore from the union government financing the job.Not many are aware, of course. Anything that's not in English barely makes news. In a country of a billion plus people, only about 10 million Indians use English as their first language. Yet an estimated 40-45% of the (again estimated) Rs 7,500 crore Indian publishing industry's sales come from English publishing. Unending colonial hangover?Yes, India has more people who know English than in its land of origin. Though most Indians are more comfortable in their mother tongues, our toffee-nosed English publishing sector, the only one really publicised by the media, is just waking up to this fact. But as Kannan, publisher of the Chennai-based Kalachuvadu group that translates books into Tamil, points out: "Authors are keen to see their work in many languages even when it does not mean much revenue. The international trend is marginal writings and Indian English publishing must turn to Indian languages to trace these expressions."

The whole article can be read here. Source: Financial Express

A Day with Read India

Some pictures and a story from spending a day with the Read India campaign in Bihar.

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Pratham Books in the Mint

Samanth Subramanian has a write up on our story cards in the Mint today:

The Read India campaign was designed to solve the problem of reading skills, and it has involved efforts such as incredibly inexpensive books and a network of around 5,000 libraries across the country...

Innovation in learning: Pratham, a non-profit publishing house from Bangalore, has sold four million story cards, most to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India’s universal education initiative.

Alternative Publishing Models

Via Peter Suber:

Frances Pinter and David Percy have made an excellent documentary film about business models in the publishing world that use Creative Commons licenses.

Frances has been heading a CC-based publishing project in Africa. It is the Publishing and Alternative Licensing Model of Africa (PALM Africa), is based in Uganda, and South Africa, and she tells me the Ugunda project is going especially well. She also tells me she'll be soon expanding this idea into other publishing spheres, which is very exciting.

Head on over to watch the interviews.

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Trifecta

Steve Rubel asks whether publishers are facing a three pronged build up to what he considers the 'perfect storm'. The three factor he identifies are gas prices because "as gas prices go up, so will the distribution costs", "a greater awareness among consumers of their environmental impact [and] will cut back on print in favor of digital media." and lastly, "growing popularity of speedy 3G-enabled smart phones".

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For an equal world

Jyotsna Sreenivasan is the creator of a website that lists books aimed at creating gender equality
The website asks, "Are you looking for good books that help children to break through gender stereotypes and be true to themselves?" No, I'm not, but I'm certainly curious about a Gender Equality Bookstore (genderequalbooks.com). Log on and you can buy "from the complete Brave Girls and Strong Women booklist of over 80 exciting, empowering books for young people ages 2-17," all from small publishers dedicated to creating a world of equality. Sure, we wanted school textbooks to be free of tiresome 'Mother is cooking, father is reading the newspaper,' 'Selvi-is-a-nurse-Murugan-is-a-doctor examples', but running a store that promotes stereotype-bashing, girl-empowering books is something else.For this, you need credentials - the kind Jyotsna "Jo" Sreenivasan, writer, editor, writing coach and creator of the website has. "I've been a feminist since childhood," she said in an interview. "My first novel for children, The Moon Over Crete, is a time-travel adventure in which a girl travels 3,500 years back in time to ancient Crete, where women and men were equal."Her award-winning novel Aruna's Journeys, for ages 8-12, is about an Indian-American girl's search for identity. Jyotsna's written Ela Bhatt's story for kids 10 years and above, fiction and non-fiction pieces for magazines, literary reviews and journals. She is a Phi Beta Kappa with an M.A. from Ann Arbor, Michigan and is founder of Awaz, a women's group.What's the website about? "When I put the website together several years ago, it seemed like people were getting interested in books with strong girl characters and women role models," she said.Though there were quite a few books that portray girls as independent and capable, parents and librarians weren't aware of those from smaller publishers. "It's not that people aren't writing or publishing such books — it's just that they often don't get much publicity."Jyotsna's website is an attempt to set this right. When you buy books for kids, you'd pick ones that are sensible, well written and perhaps with a pro-environment slant. Should you add gender to your thinking?"You could certainly add awareness of gender stereotypes when you consider which books to buy," she agreed, but the quality of writing would be the over-riding reason. "There's no point in buying a book that's poorly-written, even if the author's intentions are good."She reads every book she hosts on her website and has rejected some "because I didn't think the quality was high enough."

Source: The Hindu (Chennai)

Golden Quill Book Awards.

Just read this, thought would share it with the team....Indiaplaza.in, one of India's leading online shopping destination has instituted the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Book Awards. This annual award is aimed at encouraging quality writing amongst Indian authors. Leading publishing houses in India have been invited to nominate their best books published in 2007. Five books will be short listed and evaluated by an eminent panel of judges for the final "Critics' Choice Award". The readers will nominate the "Reader's Choice Award" through the online voting system. The winners will win the "Golden Quill" trophy and a cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh. The award will be given to an Indian author domiciled in India for original full length novel or a work of fiction in English or a translation into English of an original full length novel or work of fiction of any Indian language published in India in the previous calendar year.The panel includes Sir Mark Tully, writer and theatre critic Shanta Gokhale, Anita Nair, and novelist Mahasweta Devi. For details visit indiaplaza.in/goldenquill