Publishing Posts

Copyright Law: More Than A Moral Obligation

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

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

National Book Promotion Policy: Where Are We?

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)

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”

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

How culture filip can fast-forward pandemic recovery

On 20 Dec 2020, I wrote an article for the Asian Age on how various governments are supporting their cultural sectors. The article was published in the Deccan Herald on 21 Dec 2020 as well. Here is the original url: https://www.asianage.com/life/art/201220/is-govt-listening-culture-fillip-can-fast-forward-post-pandemic-recovery.html . The longer version of the article is reproduced below.

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Creative economy refers to a range of economic activities where value is derived from the generation or exploitation of knowledge and is copyright relevant— music, writing, art, fashion, design, and media. Also, a wider range of production activities including goods and services that rely on innovation, research and development such as film, museums, galleries and photography. UNESCO’s Cultural Times (2015), the first global map of the cultural and creative industries, acknowledges the societal value of arts and culture. It assesses the contribution of cultural and creative industries to economic growth. It estimates that they generate US$250 billion in revenue a year, creating 29.5 million jobs worldwide.

On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared a Covid19 pandemic; drastically impacting national economies. Essential industries were permitted to function but other sectors suffered terribly. Many governments did not offer any support and certainly not for the creative industries. But there were some exceptions to the rule like Germany. In June 2020, under a programme called New Start for Culture, it earmarked €1bn for arts. In Nov 2020, under Germany’s infection protection law, culture has a new legal status and is no longer classified as entertainment. Hence, cancelling arts events in the pandemic might become difficult.  On 19 March 2020, France did something similar by modifying the rules of the country’s specific unemployment scheme for artists and technicians. It announced that artist-authors could benefit with a lump sum from a solidarity fund. Italy set aside €130 million for authors and audio-visual sectors etc. On 11 December 2020, the UK’s Arts Council announced that the Culture Recovery Fund marked its £1 billion milestone, with £654 million being invested in arts and cultural organisations, part of its £1.57 billion support package. On 30 Nov 2020, Germany approved a culture budget of €2.1 billion ($2.5 billion), nearly at par with the European Union’s budget for culture of €2.8 billion to be distributed over the next seven years.

In the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill announced in the USA, approximately $75 million was for the National Endowment for the Arts. In South Africa, where 7% of the workforce are in this sector, 45% are informal, and contribute 1.6% to their GDP. The National Arts Council committed its support to the artists by continuing to pay them during the pandemic.

In May 2020, Jacinda Ardern, the PM of New Zealand, announced a $175 million package for ‘decimated’ arts – a resilience grant. The creative sector contributes nearly $11 billion a year to NZ’s GDP and employs 90,000 people. So, the New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP) with a funding package of $58.8 million will support librarians and library services and assist them to support community recovery. Ardern said “A healthy cultural sector has many positive flow-on effects for other important parts of our economy, such as technical production, hospitality, venues and domestic tourism.”

According to the World Bank (Aug 2020), in 2013, creative industries around the world generated revenues of over $2 billion and employed 29 million people. The market for creative goods is estimated to be $508 billion as of 2015. In 2015, developing economies exported more than 250 billion creative products including design goods, fashion, and films. Top exporters included China, Turkey, India, Mexico, El Salvador, and Pakistan. In the United States, the non-profit arts and culture industry generated $166.3 billion of economic activity in 2015, supporting 4.6 million jobs, while receiving only $5 billion in arts allocations by the public sector. A phenomenal ROI at 3326%!

According to Megha Patnaik’s Measuring India’s Creative Economy report (May 2020), it is estimated that approximately 1.1 million workers are employed in this sector, contributing 0.58% of the GDP (2016-17). This is less than the international average as measured by WIPO where the mean contribution is 5.48%. But in India this can be partially attributed to the lack of comprehensive data outside the formal manufacturing sector. Patnaik states that with the right growth impetus through policy and markets, the creative economy can create a large share of jobs in the future. Sanjoy Roy, co-founder Jaipur Literature Festival, confirms this by estimating that during the six days there are more than 500,000 footfalls (approx.) and 110,000 unique visitors, and the local economy benefits manifold. Apart from the immediate impact on the hospitality industry, craftspeople, jewellers etc, the long-term benefits have been the revival of the restoration of heritage buildings, reopening of museums, promoting Rajasthan as a tourist/wedding destination.

In fact, culture can accelerate socio-economic recovery from the pandemic as stated by the World Bank and UNESCO in “Culture in City Reconstruction and Recovery” (2018). The framework, entitled CURE, offers principles and strategies to apply in city reconstruction and rehabilitation in post-crisis situations. There are four prominent ways in which culture positively impacts community resilience – by building social cohesion; there is a direct relationship between the arts and culture and social and psychological well-being; fostering diverse cultural expressions offers effective ways of dealing with post-crisis trauma and reconciling affected communities; and finally, the arts and culture offer critical tools for narrative expression, community engagement, and creating experiences of collaboration. These are critical insights that policymakers need to recognise in promoting sustainable and inclusive recovery with full ownership from communities particularly after the devastating effect of the pandemic. Investing in creative industries and developing cultural capital may be worth exploring.  

2 January 2021

On Sridhar Balan’s “Off the Shelf”

Sridhar Balan is an Indian publishing industry veteran who joined the sector when it was considered a cottage industry despite “big” firms like Oxford University Press, Longman, Macmillan and Tata McGraw Hill having Indian offices. Balan continues to be an active publishing professional who is currently associated with Ratna Sagar. He is always full of interesting anecdotes when you meet him. It is not just the anecdote but the pleasure of watching him narrate the stories with a twinkle in his eye and is forever smiling. He is always so generous in sharing his experiences in publishing. So I am truly delighted that Balan was finally persuaded by Ravi Singh of Speaking Tiger Books to put together a few essays of his time spent in Indian publishing.

The essays span a lifetime in publishing where Balan recounts joining it as a salesperson. He is also a voracious reader with a phenomenal memory and a magnificent ability to tell stories. Mix it all together and voila! — a rich colection of essays that recount significant personalities associated with Indian publishing such as Dean Mahomed (1759 – 1851), a barber’s son from Patna who wrote his first book in 1794 and ultimately settled in Brighton. The essays on other publishers such as Roy Hawkins who is known for settling in India happily wedded to his job as general manager at OUP for more than thirty years. More significantly, Hawkins is credited for having “discovered” many writers such as Verrier Elwin, Salim Ali, Minoo Masani and K.P.S. Menon. Hawkins also published Jim Corbett’s unsolicited manuscript “Man-Eaters of the Kumaon”, first published in 1944. ( It is in print even today with all of Corbett’s other books!) The account of the international publicity organised for this book is a fascinating story. A dream run. A tale worth repeating over and over again including the tiny detail of having two tiger cubs join the book launch party in Manhattan on 4 April 1946. The cubs were encouraged to dip their tiny paws and leave their footprints on the books as a special memento for the guests. A copy was specially inked in this manner for the author too. Corbett had been unable to travel to NYC under military quota as his status was that of a civilian. So he missed his own book launch. Nevertheless the book sold close to 490,000 copies in that year alone. A staggering number by even today’s standards of bookselling! As for the cub footprints on the cover page of the book proved to be such a magnificent book promotion detail that it was then replicated in subsequent editions of the book.

Off The Shelf is full of such wonderful gems of publishing history. For instance, the scholar and academic trained in classics, E.V. Rieu ( 1887 -1972) was selected to head the Indian operations of OUP. He was absorbed in his work but Rieu found time to write verse for children too. Balan recounts a poem that Rieu wrote called ‘Hall and Knight”. It was written by Rieu to record his sympathy for the generations of schoolchildren who had to endure Hall and Knight’s ‘Algebra’, which was the standard textbook in mathematics.

Many of the essays revolve around the time Balan spent at OUP but there are others such as about Dhanesh Jain ( 1939 – 2019) who established Ratna Sagar or legendary bookseller of Lucknow, Ram Advani. ( Whom I too had the pleasure of meeting and who upon hearing I had joined publishing, sent me such a lovely email welcoming me to the industry.)

Balan’s enthusiasm for the book trade shines through Off the Shelf but it is his passion for inculcating the love of reading that needs to be talked about more. He shares one example of his efforts in “Reading in Tirunelveli”. It is an essay worth sharing amongst educators, librarians, book clubs etc for the gentle kindness Balan demonstrates in encouraging children to read. He suggests constructive steps in building libraries and engaging in reading sessions. It is an essay seeped in wisdom.

This is such a lovely book that I could go on and on about it but I shan’t. Just buy it. Read it for yourselves. I could not put it down and read it in one fell swoop.

31 July 2020

Books on the business of publishing

For more than 500 years the aim of all publishing was to produce a physical product, and therefore design was concerned with the qualities of the book as an object, taking into account its haptic qualities and durability as well as the visual arrangement of text, illustrations, and binding. The development of electronic publishing channels alongside the printed book has radically changed this. Publishers may control every aspect of a physical book’s design but, as content providers for electronic distribution, their influence overthe appearance of an electronic book and how readers interact with it may be limited by the devices and platforms on which they publish. The design of both the material book and the virtual book therefore need to be considered, because design for publishing involves the creation of both engaging individual artefacts and complex design systems.

p. 311, Paul Luna “Book Design”, Ch 19, The Oxford Handbook of Publishing ( eds. Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar, 2019)

Over the past few months, I have read a bunch of fascinating books on the business of publishing. These are — The Oxford Handbook of Publishing ( eds. Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar, 2019); Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books ( Eds. Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzalez, 2020); Inside Book Publishing ( Eds. Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, 6th edition, 2020) and Lynette Owen’s Selling Rights ( 8th edition, 2020). Two of these books, Inside Book Publishing and Selling Rights, are considered seminal reading, for book publishing professionals. Mapping the evolution of publishing in recent decades via the publication history of these two books is a tale unto itself. Massive shifts in the manner in which the business of publishing is conducted especially the variety of formats one has to contend with. Many of the production processes remain the same with technological advances improving the output. Yet, at the core of the business, little has changed. It is still a people’s sector that for the love of ideas and storytelling, an individual or a firm’s IPR is converted into a saleable commodity, a book. How it forms a market and operates across the globe is fascinating. It is also a unique industry in that every product created is specially designed. It is not a cookie-cutter formula applicable across the board for all products. This is also what makes the industry special.

The Oxford Handbook of Publishing is a fine collection of essays that delves into the business of publishing, from all aspects. The articles range from the history of publishing, book making, book design, rights, copyright, publishing and social responsibility, curation, globalization and publishing, strategies, educational and academic publishing, publishing and technology, marketing, libraries and bookselling. A variety of business models are discussed including those firms that have been listed on the New York stock exchange. Surprisingly, Scholastic Inc. that has been discussed in detail and is one of the few firms listed on the NYSE is not considered one of the Big Five publishers. Nevertheless, every single chapter is so packed with information, data and analysis that it takes a while to absorb it all. The concluding chapter discussing the future of publishing is thought provoking. It discusses the impact of AI on publising, the idea of translation on demand, a service made popular by Google Translate, the importance of ebooks, print on demand and the escalating costs of making print books.

Much of what is dicussed in this book is very relevant to the book publishing industry. It is seeped in histories. It shares immense amounts of knowledge as many of the essays are written by well-known publishing professionals. The case studies discussed in the book are informative and will make for essential reading in coming years. Yet it is inexplicable why large book markets outside of Anglo-America are reduced to passing references in the essays instead of being discussed in equal measure as examples cited from Anglo-America. It is an opportunity lost particularly when the business of publishing is viewed on a global scale where all markets are considered equally.

Nevertheless it is a book that is hugely useful and will find its place in many reference sections of libraries. It will be cited for many years to come. It is phenomenal work contained in a single volume.

Inside Book Publishing is already a classic in publishing studies. This is the 6th edition of the book whose editors are Giles Clark and Angus Phillips. Their opening remarks in the preface is worth reproducing:

The history of this book’s publication reflects the dramatic changes in publishing over the decades. Since its conception in the 1980s, the copyright of Inside Book Publishing has passed through six changes of outright publishing ownership, has appeared under five publishing imprints and has been worked on by eight editors. This story is not unique in publishing today.

The different editions of this book are excellent textbooks that give a clear understanding of what publishing entails. While this book has been written specifically for UK, it is a useful manual for others to consult too. Production processes are not very different in various territories. But what is truly unique in this particular edition of the book are the contributions by specialists entitled “Expert, focus and skills boxes”. It is a fantastic element to introduce in a textbook as it represents the diversity in the sector. So there are contributions by phenomenal book publicist Sam Missingham, publishing consultant Rudifer Wischenbart, journalist and International Editor of Publishers Weekly – Edward Nawotka and literary agent Juliet Pickering of Blake Friendmann. This is a book where every edition is worth treasuring!

Lynette Owen’s name is synonymous with selling of rights. Her expertise in this particular aspect of publishing is legendary. This is the eighth edition of her phenomenal book but she remains clear that it continues to be a “practical handbook for those working in the book industry, in particular rights staff working in pubilshing houses and literary agencies, but also recognising some readership from members of the legal profession with a particular interest in publishing rights, and by students on the various publishing degree courses.”

Selling Rights is more like an encyclopaedia of information on the rights market. It is a crucial segment of the publishing world. For years and years, it has been the purview of those skilled practitioners who have understood how book markets are defined and how rights operate within the territories. The buying and selling of rights is a significant contributor to the business of publishing. For decades these were confined mainly to the various print editions and whether hardback and paperback rights were to be sold together or separately. But with the twenty-first century and the explosion of multiple formats especially on digital platforms has resulted in this aspect of publishing becoming a lucrative segment but with many, many factors to be considered. Also, with growing awareness of copyright amongst authors and readers/audiences and with the growth of piracy, it is imperative that rights be managed correctly and securely. The best practices must be observed. Selling Rights is a brilliant handbook in that it encompasses all these aspects by having something for the novice to the world of rights to the more experienced professional. It is a must for all those professionals serious about copyright and observing ethical practices.

Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books is a collection of essays that engages with the impact of book publishing on book culture. It addresses interesting modern aspects of publishing such as the types of publishing houses that emerged especially in the digital landscape; structures of publishing houses and how they are being challenged or being diversified in response to evolving times; development of shared-reading communities; the review and the reviewer’ influence of creative writing courses and of couse the literary agent; the growing importance of audiobooks and finally an interesting segment on French children’s literature and autism. Many of these essays are very thought-provoking such as the one by Per Henningsgaard making the argument for Amazon to be included in the Big Six publishers. Another fascinating essay is by Jasmin Kirkbride on “Understanding our place: publishing’s role in the reading ecosystem under neoliberal economics”.

Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books as a standalone volume is fascinating but when read together as I did in conjunction with all the other books mentioend in this blog post, it helped plug in gaps that were evident in the other tellings. Simply because it was beyond the scope of the other books to take on aspects of book publishing as has been done in this volume. These are essays that make one think and not just observe, document and analyse existing publishing processes. These essays ask questions.

It has taken me weeks and months to read through these volumes. Yet, I feel that I need to return to these books over and over again. These are excellent reference volumes. At times to make sense of the rapidly evolving publishing business it is essential to read extensively especially specialist books like these where many years of shared experience and wisdom are encapsulated.

2 Aug 2020

IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE INDIA BOOK CONSUMER: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The COVID-19 crisis is an unprecedented time, suspending large parts of human normalcy and disrupting global economies, including India’s. The Indian publishing industry has experienced difficult times with the advent of the pandemic and subsequent complete lockdown. With the ease in the lockdown situation, the publishing industry is focused on book sales and preparing for post-lockdown by seeking answers which can strategically fortify their business needs. As a result, Nielsen Book India has undertaken an initiative to provide meaningful consumer insights to the publishing industry. The research aims to understand book reader’s behaviour and engagement during and after lockdown.

“At Nielsen Book we are committed to supporting the publishing industry around the world during these unprecedented times. In India we have initiated a consumer research study to understand the reading and purchasing habits of book consumers during the pandemic. The study provides a vital understanding of how long people are reading for, their favourite genres and what their preferred formats are (print, e-books and audiobooks) as well as how they are discovering and buying books and how much they are willing to spend. The findings are extremely valuable to anyone with an interest in the publishing sector, providing insights into the behaviour of the Indian book consumer and helping inform future plans.” Vikrant Mathur, Director, Nielsen Book Research, India.

Nielsen Book conducted an online survey of 1,084 Indian adults (with a ratio of 60:40 female/male) to examine the impact of reading and buying behaviour on leisure books (excluding academic books) in India. The survey was conducted from 14 May to 7 June 2020. It was disseminated to publishers, media companies, etc. and across social media where followers used the snowballing technique to reach other respondents. It should therefore be assumed that the majority of respondents are likely to be keen book readers and buyers as per the methodology used to conduct the survey. The responses from employees working in publishing, book retailing and market research companies are excluded from the study.

CHANGE IN TIME SPENT READING AND OTHER ACTIVITIES

The report shows that two thirds of book readers say they are consuming more books since lockdown began. Before lockdown, Indian book readers read books or listened to audiobooks for an average of nine hours per week. Since lockdown this has increased by seven more hours a week. Two out of five respondents spend more time reading print books, similarly one in two spend more time reading e-books and one in five listening to audiobooks.

FORMATS USED FOR READING/LISTENING

On average, print books accounted for two thirds of book reading before lockdown and respondents predicted that print books would remain nearly as important even after lockdown. A marginal improvement was also noticed in the consumption of other formats.

Before lockdown, men tended to spend comparatively more time than women reading print books and listening to audiobooks while women are shifting slightly towards digital books after lockdown. Across all ages, readers are reading majorly print books while it was noticed that the ≥35 years age group (older readers), are marginally consuming more e-books after lockdown.

POPULAR GENRES DURING PANDEMIC

Women are more likely than men not to have changed their fiction reading interests since the outbreak of COVID-19, with both sexes more interested in Crime/Thrillers and Literary/Classic Fiction, alongside Historical Fiction (men) and Romance (women). Historical/Political Biographies followed by Self-Help/Personal Development and Self-Study (learning new languages, etc.) are the most popular amongst non-fiction readers. Respondents with children aged 0-8 are especially likely to have changed their genre interests when buying for children since the outbreak of COVID-19, with increased interest in Picture Books, Activity Books and Animal Stories. Those with children aged 9-17 are more interested in buying Spy/Detective/Mystery Stories, Fantasy and Classic stories.

AUTHOR AND LANGUAGE PREFERENCES

English is the most preferred language for reading followed by Hindi. One in three male readers prefers to read in Hindi. Younger consumers (≤34) are reading more titles from international authors compared to older readers (≥35). Two thirds of respondents prefer both international as well as Indian authors while one in 11 respondents prefers only Indian authors.

METHODS FOR DISCOVERING AND CHOOSING BOOKS

Recommendations from friends/relatives followed by media articles/reviews and general browsing on bookseller websites were the most influential factors on discovering books pre and post lockdown. Female readers are more likely than men to seek out recommendations from friends/relatives and read media articles/reviews. Meanwhile, male readers like to discover books by browsing on bookseller websites and looking at bestseller sections.

CHANGE IN SOURCES USED FOR BUYING BOOKS

Purchasing online followed by physical bookstores and then home delivery were the most preferred options for buying books post lockdown. Six out of 10 respondents expect to buy books through physical stores and seven out of 10 through an online bookshop after the lockdown is lifted, with the proportion higher than before lockdown in each case, but more so for online than in-store. Respondents also think they will make more use of home delivery after lockdown than before.

PURCHASING BEHAVIOUR FOR PAPERBACK BOOKS

Fifty percent of fiction readers and forty percent of non-fiction readers prefer the price point of INR200-INR400 when purchasing paperback fiction and non-fiction titles.

If you would like to request a copy of the report please email: [email protected]

ABOUT NIELSEN BOOK

Nielsen Book provides a range of services to the book industry internationally, aiding the discovery and purchase, distribution and sales measurement of books. We are proud to run the ISBN and SAN Agencies for UK & Ireland as well as providing search and discovery services for booksellers and libraries. Our electronic trading solutions, including Nielsen PubEasy, help everyone involved in the book supply chain trade more easily and our Research services provide retail sales analysis for both print and e-books alongside research from our Books and Consumers Survey. If you would like to know more visit: www.nielsenbook.co.uk

ABOUT NIELSEN

Nielsen Holdings plc (NYSE: NLSN) is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide. Nielsen is divided into two business units. Nielsen Global Media, the arbiter of truth for media markets, provides media and advertising industries with unbiased and reliable metrics that create a shared understanding of the industry required for markets to function. Nielsen Global Connect provides consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers with accurate, actionable information and insights and a complete picture of the complex and changing marketplace that companies need to innovate and grow. Our approach marries proprietary Nielsen data with other data sources to help clients around the world understand what’s happening now, what’s happening next, and how to best act on this knowledge.

An S&P 500 company, Nielsen has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit: www.nielsen.com

Copyright © 2020 The Nielsen Company (US), LLC.
( Used with permission)

21 July 2020

Vasily Grossman’s “Stalingrad”, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

Vasily Grossman”s Stalingrad is a prequel to Life And Fate. Life and Fate (Russian edition, Soviet Union, 1988) was translated from Russian into English in 1985 by Robert Chandler and Stalingrad ( 1952, Russian edition) in 2019 by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Life and Fate had been completed by Grossman before he succumbed to cancer in 1964 but the English translation was published before permission was granted for the Russian edition. It became possible after glasnost.

Vasily Grossman was a correspondent in World War Two. His novels borrow heavily from all that he witnessed. Recently, Robert Chandler wrote a magnificent essay, “Writer who caught the reality of war” ( The Critic, July/August 2020 ). Grossman was a correspondent for Red Star, a daily military newspaper as important as Pravda and Izvestia, the official newspapers or the Communist Party and the Supreme Soviet. It was a paper read by both military and civilians. Chandler writes “According to David Ortenberg, it’s chief editor, Grossman’s 12 long articles about the Battle of Stalingrad not only won him personal acclaim but also helped make ‘Red Star’ itself more popular. Red Army soldiers saw Grossman as one of them– someone who chose to share their lives rather than merely to praise Stalin’s military strategy from the safety of an army headquarters far from the front line.”

Stalingrad is a massive book to read at nearly 900 pages. I read Constance Garnett’s translation of War and Peace in three days flat but Stalingrad was far more difficult to read. Perhaps because it was written so close in time to the events it describes. Within a decade of the Stalingrad blockade by the Nazis, Grossman’s novel had been published. Whereas “War and Peace” was written fifty years after the events fictionalised by Tolstoy. It makes a difference to the flavour of literature. Reading “Stalingrad” during the lockdown is a terrifying experience. More so because today nations around the world are dominated by right wing politicians who see no wrong in implementing xenophobic policies. The parallels with Grossman’s accounts are unmistakable. Having said that I am very glad I read Grossman”s novel. It is a detailed account of the blockade using the polyphonic literary technique. Sometimes it can get bewildering to keep track of so many characters. Also because there are chunks in the text over which Grossman does not have a very good grasp. His details of the battlefield or the stories about the Shaposhnikovs are his strongest moments in the novel. Perhaps because the war scenes are first hand experiences, much of which is brilliantly accounted for by Chandler in his recent article. And the weaker portions were written during Stalinism and Grossman probably had to be careful about what he wrote for fear of being censored.

After reading Stalingrad, I reread portions of Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin’s A Book of the Blockade ( English translation by Hilda Perham, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1983; Russian edition, 1982). This book is about the nine hundred day siege too. The auhors recreate the event by referring to diaries, letters, poems written during the blockade, and survivors’ testimonies. They also interviewed “the strong and the weak, and those who had been saved and those who had saved others”. At times it felt as if there was little difference reading Grossman’s novel or these eye witness accounts that had been gathered by Adamovich and Granin.

These are very powerful books. I am glad the translations exist. Perhaps this kind of war literature is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially during the lockdown but it is highly recommended. Sometimes it is easier to understand our present by hearkening back to the past. These books certainly help!

Moscow, 1942. Summer.
There were several reasons why people felt calmer … it is impossible to remain very long in a state of extreme nervous tension; nature simply doesn’t allow this.

Stalingrad

7 July 2020

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