The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XXV

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Dated: 24th Feb. 2008

The Publisher’s Post is a weekly newsletter that contains information relating to the book publishing and book selling industry in India.

News This Week

Kitab Festival gets a rocky start
Source: Yahoo! News

It has been a rocky start to the Kitab festival this year. The festival, organised by Pablo Ganguli has generated controversy after his former teammates sent out an email alleging that they were not paid for last year’s event.

Many participants including Mahesh Bhatt and Shobaa De are now boycotting this annual literary festival.

An email, sent to the press and the writers, has created so much bad press, that many participants like Shobha De, Dilip Chitre, Namita Devidayal and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt have boycotted Kitaab 2008.

The man in the hot seat, Pablo Ganguli, sees these allegations as a personal attack by his former teammates. He says ‘it’s absurd’.

The festival may be still on, however, with so many participants dropping out, it seems to be a bit of a write off.

“Stay hidden or leave”
Source: The Guardian, UK

The exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who is accused of insulting Islam, will be allowed to stay in India it emerged today - but only if she remains in a government flat in a secret location in Delhi, unable to receive visitors or step outside her door.

The Indian foreign affairs ministry justified the conditions saying that as a “guest” Nasrin should not “undertake actions that could hurt the sentiments of the many communities that make up our multi-religious and multi-ethnic nation.”

The full text of this article can be read here

Publishers betting big on business books
Source: rediff.com

The trailblazing India Inc. has found an admirer in book publishing companies. Some of them think that stories on Ratan Tata and Nandan Nilekani, for example, will offer greater value to Indian readers than, say, a book on Jack Welch.

According to plans that are still nebulous, publishers such as Penguin and Wiley India are collaborating with well-known Indian companies for a series of books covering people profiles and company strategies.

Penguin Portfolio, Penguin’s sub-brand or imprint formed in 2006 to publish business books, has zeroed in on the Tata group and Godrej, to begin with. Udayan Mitra, senior managing editor, Portfolio, Penguin Books, makes it clear that they are yet to sign on the dotted line, but adds, “We would look at biographies of past leaders in these organisations. Information, documents and photographs for the books would come from their archives; we would only provide them with a business writer”.

Wiley India, part of John Wiley & Sons, that boasts of imprints such as ‘Dummies’ and ‘Bibles’, is forging out on similar lines. It has already signed up two of the top five IT companies in the country to bring their in-house knowledge on both business and technology to the readers. Next on the anvil are deals with CxOs for their stories.

More on the article here

Penguin India all set to go mobile

Asia’s biggest English language publisher Penguin Books India has announced that it is entering into a partnership with Mobifusion to make content available on the mobile platform.

Mobifusion Inc. is a global developer, publisher and distributor of mobile technologies and value-added services and will make a wide range of content from Penguin’s books available to mobile customers. The partnership that will begin with a focus on the Indian consumer base will look to a global roll-out in time, expanding to include Penguin’s global brand and an array of international products.

Given changing lifestyles and evolving technologies, this tie-up is a great new step towards making content available to new readers. Consumers will soon be able to access content from books on their mobiles even when they are on the move, and participate in exciting interactive opportunities.

The Penguin–Mobifusion partnership will begin with content from three popular Penguin books—The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living with Mother Teresa complied by Jaya Chaliha and Edward Le Joly, The Path to Tranquillity by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and The Book of Prayer edited by Renuka Narayanan—being made available on mobile platforms

Foreign publishers eye India’s booming publication market
Source: Economic Times

..many foreign publishers in the recently concluded World Book Fair, overwhelmed at the response looked forward to sell rights to their Indian counterparts.

“We are ready to give rights to Indian publishers free of cost as business opportunities are vast here and cost of paper is also relatively cheaper,” says Meeraj, finance officer of the Saudi Embassy.

“Indian publishers offer good discount to us along with better services. It is also easy to sell your rights at a more affordable price here than in any other country,” says Barbara Roelle, representing a German publishing firm.

Indian publication industry, which has an annual turnover of Rs 100,000 million and has 16,000 publishers, spread over in fields of literature, science, fiction, art and others.

The industry churns out 80,000 titles every year in all major Indian languages including English.

The complete article can be read here

In other news..
Publishing house MBD group will invest Rs 100 crore ($25 million) within the next three years to develop customised educational e-contents for schools, corporate houses and those preparing for competitive examinations
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e-Author, Oxford Bookstore’s online writing program on www.oxfordbookstore.com, launched its latest version e-Author 5.0 today. e- Author rewards the finest of new and emerging writers every year. This year promises to be as exciting as ever as Oxford Bookstore invites original unpublished works of fiction from amateur novel and short-story writers across the country
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The State Legislative Council of Andhra Pradesh has adopted a unanimous resolution appealing to the Central Government to confer the status of classical language on Telugu. The resolution, moved by Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, urged the Centre to recognise the 2,000-year-old epigraphical, literary and historical evidences of Telugu. It should consider the distinct history of Telugu as a classical language. Source: greaterhyderabad.co.in
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Vice-President Hamid Ansari has called upon the staff of Dairatul Maarif Osmania, a bureau for research and publication of Arabic manuscripts, to explore better marketing opportunities to popularise the books brought out by the renowned centre. The Vice-President was on a visit to the more than a century old centre in the Osmania University campus on Thursday. Source: greaterhyderabad.co.in
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Noted Bengali poet and novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay was on Thursday elected as the new president of the Sahitya Akademi while renowned Punjabi poet and critic S S Noor was elected unopposed as vice-president.

New Book Releases & Events

Book Launch at at IHC - 25th Feb 08
Source: delhievents.com

The Shattered Thigh And Other Plays and Tales of the Ten Princes by A.N.D. Haksar will be launched at the Indian Habitat Centre, on the 25th Feb 08.

The work is a selection of the earliest existing plays by a major dramatist in classical Sanskrit. Bhasa is one of the most celebrated names in classical Sanskrit literature. He lived and wrote about two thousand years ago. Though his dates have not been conclusively established, it is certain that Bhasa preceded Kalidasa, the great poet and dramatist of ancient India, who has praised Bhasa by name in one of his own plays.

Bhasa’s works were considered lost and it was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that some of his plays were recovered. Six of these, which form the present collection, are based on the Mahabharata, which provides a thematic unity to the plays. Bhasa’s strengths were his skilful melding of dialogue, legend and dramatic action. The comparatively short and fast-paced plays in The Shattered Thigh are remarkable in their nearness to modern idiom despite their antiquity.

Of the six plays in this collection, four - The Middle One, The Envoy, The Message and Karna’s Burden - are one-act plays evoking tragic and heroic emotions. Five Nights and The Shattered Thigh have three and two acts respectively. The latter is a tragedy in which the hero dies on stage, an innovation that is very unusual in Sanskrit drama.

The book is published by Penguin Books India

Indian tribal artists reach New Horizons: Gond Art Book Wins Major International Award

Tara Publishing has announced that their handmade book The Night Life of Trees has just been awarded the 2008 BolognaRagazzi Award for New Horizons. The Ragazzi Award is among the most prestigious international awards conferred each year in the world of children’s book publishing. This is the first time a book from India has been bestowed this honour. The Ragazzi award is tied to the Bologna Book Fair, which is the largest children’s book fair in the world. The award will be presented at a special ceremony on March 31st, 2008.

Originally published as an art book, The Night Life of Trees has crossed genres to appeal to not only art aficionados, but to children and adults alike, testifying to the power of a book to transcend categorization and to appeal to a wide audience. The Night Life of Trees is an exquisite hand-bound and screen-printed book of tree paintings by three of the finest living artists of the Gond tribal art tradition - Ram Singh Urveti, Durga Bai and Bhajju Shyam. Through their art, they provide a fascinating and haunting foray into the Gond imagination, in which the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of the natural world are inseparable.

This year’s international jury of experts at Bologna included Antonio Faeti, Italy; Dorothée Charles, France and Manuel Estrada, Spain.

Generation 14

Penguin Books India, The PEN All-India Centre, Mumbai and CROSSWORD invite you to the release of generation 14, co-published by Zubaan and Penguin India. The book by Priya Sarukkai Chabria will be launched on February 27th, 2008 at 7.00pm at the Crossword Bookstore, Bandra (W),Mumbai.

Noted poet and theorist Ranjit Hoskote will introduce the book followed by a reading and presentation by the author.

Contact Harish Shenoy (Penguin India) at 98210 14546 or Veena Premjani (Crossword) at 98217 71480 for details

Posthumous Kamala Markandaya publication
Source: The Hindu (New Delhi)

In a literary event of huge significance, Penguin Books India has announced posthumous publication of Kamala Markandaya’s new novel Bombay Tiger.

With this release coinciding with the recent World Book Fair, Markandaya’s complete backlist of ten novels, including the classic Nectar in a Sieve, moves to Penguin India and will be launched in batches throughout 2008.

Following her debut in 1954, Markandaya wrote nine novels of which the last, Shalimar, was published in 1982. Though she did not publish anything else till her death in 2004, the author had been working on a major novel set in the rapidly transforming India of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Shortly after her death, the typescript was discovered by her daughter who decided to get it published

Set in Mumbai in the 1980s, the novel is a sweeping narrative marked by a rich and sophisticated characterisation and description that is usually not found in Indian contemporary fiction. Gloriously enriched in incidents and characters, Bombay Tiger is the work of a major writer at the peak of her form.

Those Other Mountains
Source: Scholars Without Borders (http://swblogs.blogspot.com/)

More ancient than the larger and better-known Himalayas to the north, the Sahyadris harbour the most intact rainforests in peninsular India. Countless species of plants and animals live here, many of which are found nowhere else on earth, and countless of which are still being discovered. Matching this incredible biological richness is the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Western Ghats. Sandesh Kadur and Kamal Bawa, in their book Sahyadris published by ATREE, Bangalore, take you on a visual journey through this range of mountains also known as the Western Ghats.

The book is, truly speaking, exquisite. Lavishly produced, it does full justice to the superb photographs that document the flora and fauna of this wonderland. Many, from E O Wilson ( “The book is an incredible reflection of the magnificence of the Western Ghats.”) to George Schaller (”No one can look at the book and not be entranced and emotionally connected. The combination of photography and text is superb and truly conveys the great diversity of life in both reality and spirit.”) - have been lavish in their praise, but when you see the book, you know it is well earned.

ISBN 9780977021109. Rs 2950

In another category, but on the same subject, is the two-volume Sahyadri: The Great Escarpment of the Indian Subcontinent edited by Y Gunnell and B P Radhakrishna, for the Geological Society of India, also based in Bangalore. This book contains several papers reviewing the morphological evolution of this remarkable landform marking the western border of India. A geologists delight, this is the ideal companion to the other title listed here, and with which it takes exception, particularly on the age of the mountains.

Rs 1500. ISBN 81-85867-45-3

Blogs and Articles

For Marx too, market’s boss
Source: The Telegraph, Calcutta

Call it the market’s revenge on Marx or Marx’s revenge on the market.

But if you want to possess the proletariat’s bible, you’ll need to put some capital on the table and then some.

The complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels can cost up to Rs 1.5 lakh and come bearing the stamp of the US and Britain, two most potent symbols of capitalism.

No Indian publisher brings them out - not even Leftword, which has CPM general secretary Prakash Karat as its managing director.

Before the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet-owned Progressive Publishers used to sell the collected works in 50 volumes for Rs 3,000, or even less with discounts. The company wound up long ago but some old, worn-out volumes - though usually not the complete set - can still be found at the odd bookshop.

In Calcutta, where the communists are ruling for 30 years, it’s hard finding Capital Volume I, let alone the whole set, of Soviet vintage.

The whole article can be read here

Using Facebook as a marketing tool

Following Outlook’s article on the emergence of Facebook as a marketing tool, I took a cue and created my own page so that I could market CinnamonTeal. And then this article that offers self-publishers tips on how to market their books using the latest craze in cyberspace. Something in it for publishers too, perhaps.

Publishers worldwide are braced for the slow death of the book
Source: The Times, UK

Given the advantages of the humble book, it seems inconceivable that it could ever be replaced by an electronic reader. But, just as the music, film and television industries have been forced to grapple with the consequences of the internet, publishers are facing up to the digital threat. In the latest in a series of industry moves to embrace the digital world, Random House announced yesterday that it would allow readers to download chapters of books. HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, has revealed plans to allow readers access to previews of new titles online. British and American publishers are rushing to digitalise their back catalogues.

The article by Antonia Senior can be accessed here

Other Announcements

Short Story Competition
Source: womenswriting.com

Gelathi, an organisation dedicated to writing in Kannada is holding a short story competition. Open to women writers aged between 18 and 25, all entries have to be in by the 15th of March 2008. Three winners will be announced and each will receive Rs 1000.

Send your story directly to gelathi at sukanya@gelathi.com or Ms Usha BN, 577 10th cross, 7th block, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560082

“Open Book Reviews”
Those interested may sign up for our review section where original reviews of books will be posted, details of which are available here. A database that lists all service providers is also open for those interested.

Associate Service Provider
CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Services offers partnership opportunities through their Associate Service Provider (ASP) initiative. For details, visit this page.

Organizations and Publishing Houses willing to advertise for various positions related to publishing are invited to do so in this section.
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This newsletter is developed by Queenie Fernandes and Leonard Fernandes, founders of CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Services with inputs from various individuals, publishing houses, websites and blogs.

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