Remaindered books killing Indian publishing!

Tue, Jan 5 12:23 PM

At some point or the other, you may have bought books from one of those 'UPTO 200% OFF!' (forgive the exaggeration) sales at your neighbourhood bookstore. You saw a colourful, glossy imported book at Rs.300, the cover price of which was $20, and gave in to the temptation, only to find later that it was high on effect and low on substance. If given a second chance, you may not even want to spend 100 bucks on it.

Here is the behind-the-scene story of how that book reached the bookstore. Warehousing and distribution facilities in developed countries like the US and UK are outsourced. Once a book has outlived its relevance - a children's encyclopaedia published a couple of years back or a coffee-table book done a few autumns before - local sales become negligible and it begins costing the publisher a considerable amount of money to keep such a book in stock. What he does then is remainder the book, which essentially means that he invites glorified 'kabadiwalas' (scrap-buyers) from countries like India and offers them such stock at throwaway prices.

So a book with a cover price of say $15 is offered at something like a 50 cents. There is a mad rush of people who gleefully participate at the Remainder Book Fairs across the globe and bring back container loads of such books.

But did anyone ever give a thought at what cost? Firstly, such cheap imports are a setback to the local publishing industry and thus, to the indigenous writers, illustrators and photographers. They snatch away opportunities from local talent which are richly deserved. Not to mention, the loss to the national economy, as the book hasn't used Indian paper, printers or binders. Since book imports don't attract any excise or customs duty, it's a loss-loss situation for the country.

Also, not knowing exactly what is happening, sincere on-the-fringes readers get put off by reading such books and actually lower their book buying. The worst part is that this whole circus breeds corruption. Having got excessive margins, some suppliers bribe librarians and book purchasers, causing rot to a system which ought to be a pure facilitator of knowledge.

The solutions are simple. At the policy side, the government should apply anti-dumping laws on book imports - any book which hasn't been published or reprinted in the same year as it is being imported shouldn't be allowed to enter Indian shores. Also, just as we can't export a book for less than 40 percent of its listed value, similarly, a book shouldn't be allowed to be imported for less than 40 percent of its cover price.

Till all that is achieved, we can fall back on our wonderfully discerning and patriotic reader to never buy such 'cheap' books!

(Shobit Arya is the publisher of Wisdom Tree, an independent Indian publishing organisation. He can be contacted at shobit.arya@wisdomtreeindia.com)

Shobit Arya

Article in The Hindu on Kindle

Virtually yours

It's not just for those in the business of publishing, ordinary readers too can gain immensely from e-books

A certain Mr. Gutenberg may be turning in his grave because of it. Many conventional book lovers would rather be caught dead than use this devil. The publishing industry is biting its nails not knowing what shape this semi-explored genie will take. But one thing is for sure — e-book readers are here to stay. Rather — even at the cost of making preposterous predictions — let me say that e-book readers are here to rule.

I'll tell you why. The biggest challenge in the book business anywhere in the world is distribution. Whether an author rolls out a bestseller or not, he/she will always have the complaint against the publisher that not enough copies of his/her book have been made available at the x or y bookstores. Suppose we look at the scenario where people only read e-books, a book would never go out of stock. It can be downloaded to a hand-held gadget within seconds in any part of the world. Technology has the power to be a great leveller here and can rid the publishing industry of distribution hiccups, arguably one of the biggest headaches it suffers from.

Affordable pricing

Now, it's not just about people associated with publishing, book lovers too can gain immensely from this technological revolution.

Almost half of a book's cover price is what could be termed as ‘middlemen's margin'. Add to that the cost of production of the book, warehousing, transportation, wastage in the form of damaged copies and the cost of managing these operations. If you shift to e-books, the price, say of a book that costs Rs.100, can come down to Rs.30! What more could a book lover ask for — being saved from the disappointment of not finding the book he/she wants to read in the neighbourhood book shop and actually getting it at the click of a button from the convenience of her study at an absolutely affordable price. Add to this, the contribution e-books would make to our environment. According to statistics, more than 40 per cent of logged trees are used in making paper. Couple this with the air, water and sound pollution caused by the paper mills, the printing press, the vehicles used for transporting raw materials. Also, materials like inks, chemicals, rubber rollers and plastic get used regularly. The resultant collateral damage to the environment is colossal. A simple e-book reader can save our earth from all this, and it works well with coffee.

SHOBIT ARYA

(The author is the publisher of Wisdom Tree, the first Indian publishing organisation to sell its books through Amazon Kindle.)

The world is the market for e-book readers

Article on e-book readers published in The Economic Times, Khaleej Times etc

Shobit Arya

ians.in

Last Updated: November 29,2009 11:36:39

The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is a novelty, a fad. These were the words uttered famously by a president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer Horace Reckham not to invest in the Ford Motor Co. in 1903. Blame it on the Theory of Technological Evolution or call it the Survival of the Fastest (with due respects to Mr. Darwin) but for a majority of people, travelling in an automobile is as much a part of normal activity as may be bushing their teeth. The day also is not far, oh you lover-of-the-scent-of-paper, when e-book readers will fall in the same bracket.

Coming back to the story, Rackham ignored the advice and bought $5,000 worth of stock and eventually made a fortune by selling it for $12.5 million. The natural question here is: in whose position would you like to be? Horace Rackham's or the banker's? If that's not already easy to answer, let me make it easier for you.

Kindle, the popular e-book reader was the #1 bestselling, #1 most wished for and #1 most gifted item on Amazon. Nook, the brand new e-reader unveiled by Barnes & Noble (who claim it to be the world's most advanced e-book reader), is already out of stock because of unexpected demand.

This is when e-book readers today are priced a bit uncomfortably around $250 and are in a nascent stage in terms of features, much like the first Ford car, if I may carry forward the analogy. By the end of 2010, it is expected that 10 million people will be using e-readers. And if by any chance they break the $100 barrier, which I believe they will eventually, the floodgates will really open.

There are reports that we already have an enterprising Indian publishing industry representative planning to bring in an economical e-reader for the Indian market with Chinese collaboration. And Apple, of course, is rumoured to have a real ace up its sleeve. So, apparently, there is a lot waiting to happen in the near future which could turn things completely around for electronic reading.

This really brings us to the all-important question -- what's the whole song and dance about? We are pretty happy reading our books, why do we need an electronic reader?

For one, it weighs approximately the same as a paperback but can store about 1,500 books; so that's like your personal library moving around with you -- to the conference, on a flight, in the waiting lounge, just about everywhere.

And then, you don't have to desperately keep looking for that elusive copy of the book you have been looking forward to read because it's just a click away -- log on to a supporting website like amazon.com and you have the book downloaded in less than a minute in almost any part of the world.

Mind you, there is no extra fee, apart from paying for the book. If that's not all, your e-book reader also remembers the last page read for each book and has a zoom feature with various levels of text size among a lot of other features like letting you take notes on a page and saving them, MP3 playback and basic browsing to check your e-mail (where available) as also working like a GPS.

Still not excited? All right, the biggest bonus is that an e-book already sells at a lower price than a physical book and soon we should see a dramatic lowering on that -- you can expect the price to be actually lower than half of what it is now.

Do I finally see your eyes lighting up?

Let me confess I am no techno-freak. Actually, I just about manage to use my phone for sending and receiving calls and messages. Also, I quite love the look and feel of a book. In fact, my wife perennially complains that she married someone who was already married -- to books. But at the same time, I can see that the future of reading is beckoning us and there is no use closing our eyes to it.

I am planning to switch sides. From a love marriage with books, I plan to get into an arranged marriage with an e-book reader. I am sure love will follow, because I could feel it at first sight.

Let me invite you to join the party too, unless you want to be in the company of the legendary Thomas J. Watson, the former president of IBM and one of the richest men of his times, who had famously remarked in 1943: 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers'.

For the whole world is a market for e-book readers.

(Shobit Arya is the publisher of Wisdom Tree, first Indian publishing organisation to sell its books through Amazon Kindle, the popular e-book reader. He can be contacted at shobit.arya@gmail.com or www.wisdomtreeindia.com)

@ Copyright 2009 Indo Asian News Service.

I am an Indian

Ideally, there is a first mover's advantage, which, unfortunately India has seldom had. If that wasn't enough, we don't even inculcate learning-from-the-first-mover's-mistakes advantage. So what have you ? Most of the newly born and toddler book retail chain stores in India not learning from their grandpa like stores in the West. They seem to be repeating the same mistakes, if not actually inventing graver ones. Book buyers looking at what gives them better profit on paper rather than understanding what a book has to offer is certainly a doomsday call in book-selling. And then you have salespersons in book-cum-music-cum-gift stores who don't know their Erich Seagal from their Enrique or their Jagjit Singh from Khushwant Singh. Singh is King after all, same difference !

A great lesson for them could be Foyles Bookstore at Charing Cross Road, London. An amazing bookshop where the salesperson is also the book buyer. In one stroke, they seem to have eliminated most of the recent day problems in book retailing and seem to be doing
wonderfully well.

This is nothing madamji ( pardon me sirji, i prefer concentrating on what deserves concentration), look at what we have managed to do with the deadly-but-let's-not-call-it-so Swine Flu...err H1N1 virus... lest the pigs take offense. We knew the whole world was getting it; we knew we have cities with some of the highest density of population in the world; we knew we have the maximum number of young people in the world, yet what did we do ? I can give you a first hand account. A brave me with my wife and our two young angels (did you hear devils, that was my wife, sorry) arrived at I.G.I.A, New Delhi straight from New Jersey, USA in the middle of the H1N1 scare. The anxious masked young girls sitting behind the desk looked at us with an expression that said don't-be-angry-but-even-we-don't-know-what-we-are-doing-here and quickly parroted what they had been trained to say — " Do any of you have fever ? Or a cold ? Or a cough? If you get any of these symptoms, do call me dearies, for now, please leave." This, in a country where confirmed patients run away from hospitals and ministers have to personally ensure that they are fetched back.

I don't know why i am sounding so skeptical. I am an Indian. Upar wala sab theeek karega. He will take care of all of us. After all, He is the one who also created the pigs.

Books — everyone's punching bags ?

"Do you have a Rakhi gift for me?"
"Yes, a book,"replies the young boy.
" A book?" asks the sister with a grim expression and suddenly her eyes light up when she realises the gift pack actually has chocolates inside. Hmm, so what the creative copywriter is trying to say is books are boring, are they?

Now move over to an ad of ' teach yourself English' CD. This guy actually has the audacity to literally throw away books and choose the CD because one CD can replace a whole encyclopaedia in book form. Hmm, stuff for another P.I.L, is it?

The first thing to suffer when the government has a resource-crunch — books of course!

The first thing corporates decide to deduct their budgets from in recession — you guessed it, books!

And finally, the first thing newspapers ensure vanishes from their pages during meltdowns — book reviews, what else!

The Times of India, India's leading newspaper, has no space for books in the main paper, not even in their Hindi version. The only little space they have is for spiritual books, that too is actually sublet to their sister concern Indiatimes. Now, these poor fellas apparently have something that the whole world is ailing from — a resource crunch and to beat that, they have started selling that space. Thankfully, no self-respecting publisher wants to get into a frivolous arrangement, so what do you have? All kinds of strange books being showcased in India's flagship newspaper. But who is the sufferer? Books and book lovers!

Hindustan Times, the other print biggie recently shifted the book reviews to Saturdays, ( from the leisurely Sundays) a bit of a letdown, but they still give it a whole page. May Goddess Saraswati bless them!

I would be failing in my duty if i were not to mention the messiah of writers, book lovers and publishers — The Hindu. They have stood by their values undeterred — recession or no-recession. May both Goddess Saraswati and Goddess Lakshmi bless them!

And for rest of the above, may Ganesha bestow them with some good sense. Amen!

Taking India to the World

A recent interview published in New York based newspaper called The South Asian Times coinciding with my recent visit to the Book Expo America, guess i am more photogenic in Indian ambience !

The Knowledge Trinity

It seems i am getting hooked to blogging, haven't blogged for a couple of months and i already have withdrawal symptoms. So here i am, returning from back-to-back London and New York trips which kept me away from the routine ( thankfully i still take a bath everyday unlike a lot of people in London :)

London and New York, two big cities — two of the biggest hubs of world publishing. It is almost as if they were separated at birth — strikingly similar and teasingly different. Let's begin first with what binds them. They say the London weather is as unpredictable as Indian women, if that's the case then New York weather is no different from a T20 cricket match, to use a cliche, the only thing predictable about it, is that it is unpredictable. The roaring, rather deafening subway trains in the two cities— the New York Subway and the London Underground — almost simultaneously built in the beginning of 20th century are remnants of the might and vision that was, and a loud (literally) reminder of the need for constant improvement. Another queer similarity is the number and kind of Indians you come across — be it on the Wall Street or the Oxford Street — and mind you a lot of them are not the "Paaji, ki haal hai ? ( 'Brother how are you? ' in Punjabi) types".

Talking about Indians, most of the Indian restaurants in London are actually run by Bangladeshis — majority of them serve good-for-nothing food and are actually doing a dis-service to both Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine. To top it, they are downright rude.
I have a suggestion. I think all Indian-run restaurants should start writing "Run by Indians" underneath the restaurant names to retain the brand-value of Indian cuisine. Food reminds me of the American tradition of 'big things' — from big cars to bigger buildings and the biggest portions of food you would ever eat, they seem to have a fetish for size. Bookshops in New York faithfully follow the pattern too, though as of now, there are more people buying books in a London bookshop than in its compatriot in New York. Americans seem more clued on to the mind-body-spirit genre while for the British, lifestyle books appear to champion the non-fiction genre. There is of course far more interest in India and Indian subjects in London than in 'The Big Apple'. A visit to the museums in the two cities clears any misconceptions that one may have on this. British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum also display the inherent capacity of the British to look beyond the obvious. Their impeccable upkeep is even more creditable because they don't charge a penny in entrance fee, (except for special shows) unlike the US museums which have more-than-a-nominal entrance fee. No wonders British take pride in their sense of history.

It is time the book people of Darya Ganj too realised that they have a chance to create history — to make New Delhi one of the three big cities of world publishing — the missing link of the knowledge trinity.