The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XXXIII

Dated: 20th Apr. 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

Writers prefer agents instead of publishers
Source: The Economic Times

“One of the most important thing that most people would like to do is get down to write their own book and see it in print. It is believed that publishing your book is one of the most desirable things for most human beings that they want to do in their lifetime. But making a book into a reality also happens to be one of the most difficult tasks for writers across the world,” says Vikram Chauhan, the owner of a website that is creating a different model for literary agencies. Today he has more than 200 writers with him and at least two authors have clinched a publishing deal with offline publishers.

Though literary agencies are new to the Indian publishing market, the entire industry as such feels that it is the one missing link between authors and publishers in India. Mr Chauhan agrees that he is the new version of the literary agent in India but he also adds that if there are no publishers to take the books of his authors, he can offer the book of that author to any interested buyer on the net for just Rs 149, irrespective of the number of pages. His next step is to put a buy button next to the name of the book and the customer can simply order the book. There is a chance that the most ordered book will also have a better chance of being published by the offline publisher, he feels.

Read the full text here

Bid to bring NE talents to fore
Source: The Assam Tribune

In a bid to recognise and encourage the talented youths in the North-East, the Kamal Kumari Foundation, which gives away the annual Kamal Kumari and Siva Prasad Barooah National Awards in three disciplines, has decided to confine the awards to young achievers of the region. “We want to promote young talents of the North-East by recognizing their achievements and feats. From 2009 onwards the awards would be given to young men and women from the region who excel in the fields of art and culture, science and technology, and journalism,” HP Barooah, chairman of the foundation, told the media.

The Kamal Kumari awards were instituted by the foundation in 1990 to promote excellence in the three above-mentioned fields. The Siva Prasad Barooah award was instituted in 1999 to promote news-media excellence.

Barooah said that in addition to the regular awards, the foundation was also contemplating to institute a ‘lifetime achievement’ award in the three categories. “We are keen to start a lifetime achievement’ award in the three categories, which could be given every two years,” he said

Elaborating on the awards that carry Rs 1 lakh each, journalist Wasbir Hussain who is a member of the foundation, said that the award in the art and culture category would honour authors, poets, novelists, playwrights or stage actors, directors or painters from the North-East in recognition of their creative works. The applicants should not be above 40 years of age on the day the advertisement calling for applications appears in the media.

Publishers urged to reach out to print-disabled population
Source: The Hindu

It is one thing to ensure literacy for all but another to provide opportunities to the ‘print-disabled,’ a segment that covers a wide spectrum of the visually challenged people. With technology widening its net to cover a larger population, it is only apt that it should be used for social benefit.

This was the underlying message at a seminar ‘Print Access for All’ sought to convey. Vidya Vrikshah, a non-governmental organisation that tries to take technology to the visually challenged, organised the seminar here on Saturday to discuss ways to help the print-disabled access copyrighted books, newspapers, audio and video clippings.

Speakers at the seminar, sponsored by The Hindu, felt that true inclusiveness was one in which publishers of such material made them available to the print-disabled population voluntarily, or in compliance with the laws that protected copyright and intellectual property rights. Though efforts were being made in isolation by a few NGOs, much more need to be done to make material already published or broadcast accessible.

Chandamama, 60, will not retire
Source: Hindustan Times

In the early ’70s, an eight-year-old boy in Patna would wait anxiously for the local newspaper vendor to dispatch a packet every month. After all these years and success in India’s biggest dream factory, Bollywood, he still remembers the leap of heart at getting his copy of Chandamama.

Shekhar Suman is one of the millions who has grown up with the comic book, which on Thursday celebrates 60 engrossedly read years with the launch of its anniversary book. Amitabh Bachchan will launch it at JW Marriott, Juhu.

At retirement age, the once-fading title is poised to reinvent itself with an upgraded Web presence featuring interactive games and puzzles, downloadable wallpapers for cellphones and programmes on Worldspace radio.

As a book, Chandamama has seen a revival too, going up to four lakh readers from 1.3 lakh in six months. To toast it, a 96-page comic book will hit the stands every four months from April 21.

Books for India’s northeast, courtesy Scholars Without Borders
Source: Sinlung.com

For Dul Hussain, a student of Dibrugarh University in Assam who is preparing for his civil services exams, book hunting has become a regular feature. Most of the preparatory texts he needs are not available at bookstores or libraries there. But thanks to an initiative of a Delhi-based professor, his troubles might just come to an end.

Scholars Without Borders, an initiative of Ram Ramaswamy, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) whose aim is to make books available to all, is now focusing its attention on the northeast.

“..through the website of Scholars Without Borders or through an SMS, one can order just about any book without having to pay anything extra. Since we work with all the well-known publishers, we have almost everything that is there in their catalogue,” Ramaswamy told IANS.

One can access their website at www.scholarswithoutborders.in. To actually live up to its name and reach out to people who know little about this platform, they have now decided to go campaigning in the northeast.

“The Ford Foundation is funding us to go to the northeast and have workshops with students from town to town, get in touch with bookstores and libraries and basically make the people there aware of our service”, Ramaswamy added.

Functional for the last two years, Scholars Without Borders has a range of books in its catalogue - agriculture, art and architecture, economics, education, law, film studies, children, music, gender.

The “Karnataka Learning Partnership”

The Karnataka Learning Partnership is a unique public private partnership between the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and a number of NGOs. It was set up to improve learning outcomes among primary school children in all government schools in Karnataka to ensure that they are learning at the age appropriate level.

There are multiple programmes being implemented under the Karnataka Learning Partnership.

= Reading Support Programme
= Mathematics Support Programme

The Reading Support Programme is designed to achieve reading proficiency among children. We know from research that 40% of children in a class cannot read at an age appropriate level. It is critical to address this, if the child is expected to learn well. The Reading Support Programme focuses on making reading a key activity within the existing school system and uses a simple story based methodology to facilitate the reading process for children.

No takers for encyclopedia
Source: Hindustan Times

Encyclopaedia Britannica, the patriarch of all libraries and the ultimate summary of human knowledge, is all but dead.

The book, which for much of its 240-year-old history signaled stature, class and intellectual pretension on the part of the owner, now finds very few individual buyers. Prasanta Chatterjee, senior manager (sales), Standard Publicity, which has been distributing the book in India since 1908 says, “This year we have sold a set a month on an average after offering 35 per cent discount.” There are no buyers at the sticker price of Rs 55,000.

The figure was three times as many in 2004 when 35 sets were sold at the Kolkata Book Fair, helped by an on-the-spot loan from United Bank of India. But the bank suffered defaults on EMI payments and immediately discontinued the scheme.

But even with such poor figures, Kolkata still tops Indian metros in terms of individual buyers, reveals Chatterjee. The country consumes about 700 sets a year, mostly due to institutional buyers.

It is mainly due to the onslaught from technology upstarts like the Internet and DVD that the iconic book which used to boast of contributions from the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Leon Trotsky is facing extinction.

If the Internet is the primary accused, pigoen hole flats housing nuclear families is the co-conspirator.

New Book Releases & Events

Storytelling session by Katha

Katha invites you to a storytelling session based on the book Hanuman’s Adventures in the Nether World, at the Oxford Bookstore. It is a beloved and an ancient classic retold by Madhavai S Mahadevan and illustrated by Srivi.

Storyteller Nupur Awasthi will lead the audience into the interesting and mythical world of Hanuman and the Master Magician, Mayil Ravana. There will be a mask making and an interactive quiz too.

Venue: Oxford Bookstore
Statesman House, First Floor, 148, Barakhamba Road
Date: April 25
Time: 10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Age: 8-11

RSVP: 9818465461/ 26521752

Abandoned
Source: swblogs.blogspot.com

A group of students and teachers at Delhi University have started a non-funded independent research group, Perspectives. They work on issus of social, political and economic relevance and attempt to understand them by assessing the situation first-hand and “on the ground”.

ABANDONED. Development & Displacement is a book that they have brought out a year or so ago (a revised second edition was published a couple of months ago,) in which they question displacement and the model of development that is being followed in India, most visibly in Nandigram and Singur. The inevitability of displacement- be it villagers in these parts of West Bengal, or tribals who have been relocated thanks to mega-dam projects- has become synonymous with economic development. In this book, the Perspectives team offers an alternate perspective… Development has to be for the people, not at the cost of the people.

Blogs and Articles

Pioneering library sparks volunteerism
Source: indiatogether.org

Launched after a successful international pledge campaign in 2007, the Bakul children’s library in Bhubaneshwar is slowly turning into a node for various kinds of volunteering. Professors, young artists, students, organisers and others have started chipping in.

The Bakul library is one of the largest children’s libraries in the state of Orissa. It houses more than 8,000 books (primarily in Oriya and English, and some in Hindi) as well as multimedia and other educational material. There are no user charges for reading and referencing in the library, and there are no formalities involved in terms of becoming a member till now. Any child can drop in and read. Lending of books has not started, and a small fee might be levied as and when it starts. The library is run by the Bakul Foundation, with Dr Jatindra Nayak, Professor of English Literature, Utkal University as President, and is managed by volunteers Sujit Mahapatra and Satyajit Puhan with help from Puspalata Sethi and others.

A pledge campaign - “Donate Books, Build a Library” - was launched on the Internet by the trio of Satyajit Puhan, Sujit Mahapatra, and Ayushman Sarangi on the Orissa Day, 1 April 2006. Puhan is a young development economist and one of the founders of the Film Society of Bhubaneswar, Mahapatra is a Ph D scholar of English Literature at Delhi University and Sarangi is a computer engineer at Adobe. The campaign site was www.pledgebank.com/bakul-library. The goal was to mobilize a thousand people who would directly contribute (either with cash for a book or directly with a book) to set up a library, initially focusing on children and youth in Bhubaneswar. The deadline to get 1,000 supporters as well as to set up the library was the 1st of April 2007.

By the time the deadline passed, 1011 people had pledged support, and the library managed to start functioning. Around two thirds of those who signed up for the pledge were of Oriya origin, the rest being non-Oriya including some foreigners with significant proportions of both the groups being based out of Orissa.

A tribute to those who spread the word
Source: The Hindu

In an unusual tribute by a publisher to the extraordinary publishing efforts in Kannada, Abhinava Prakashana is bringing out a 12-part series called “Pustaka Lokada Ananyaru.”

The first in the series is on Akshara Prakashana, started by Magsassay Award-winning theatre person and writer the late K.V. Subbanna way back in 1957. Initiated in the village Heggodu in Sagar district along with the theatre repertory Ninasam, it went on to create history and broke the myth that no village-centric effort can survive and make an impact.

Abhinava has since brought out two more volumes, on Dharwad-based Manohara Granthamale (started by the late G.B. Joshi) and Mysore-based Kavylaya (started by Kudali Chidambaram).

“Some of the best-known writers in Karnataka, including Girish Karnad, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Aa. Na. Kru. and G.P. Rajaratnam, were introduced by Manohara Granthamale. Kavyalaya is credited with publishing the first 50 works of Kuvempu and brought to light an author and translator like H.V. Savitramma besides publishing many works of D.V. Gundappa and Pu.Thi. Naarasimhachar,” says N. Ravikumar, the man behind Abhinaya. Among the nine books to be brought out in future there will be two special issues. One will feature Kannada organisations of colleges which also took on publishing and another will be on writers who brought out their own works.

Compiling material on publishing houses has not been easy, says Mr. Ravikumar.

“The irony is that most publishers do not keep documents on their own history. Nobody has taken an initiative so far to compile it which is crucial to understanding the growth of a language,” he says. He also observes that there is a striking similarity in the problems that publishing enterprises face despite vast changes in the technology of printing.

Indians in British crime thrillers
Source: Hindustan Times

Indians are not only the largest minority living in Britain but also the most prosperous. The community has become so deeply enmeshed in British life over the past decades that it is making an appearance in works of fiction, such as that staple of popular reading - crime thrillers.

In the past year, at least three of the top authors of crime fiction in Britain have featured Indians as minor characters or as passing references in their books, from Ruth Rendell to Ian Rankin.

Books by Ruth Rendell and noted author Quintin Jardin have an Indian as a junior detective on their crime squad.

Quintin Jardin’s latest offering, Dead and Buried features his popular detective Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner who is in the running for chief constable’s job. It is the eighth in the Bob Skinner series.

The setting for the crime thriller is Edinburgh, and Skinner’s core team of detectives includes Detective Tarvin Singh, appearing for the second time in Jardine’s novels. Big Singh is a tall fellow with a hearty appetite to match his large size and is well liked by his mates.

The whole article can be accessed here.

Other Announcements

“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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