With no equivalent of the AAP or UK’s Publishers’ Association in India (Nielsen only tracks the sale of physical books), the dip in the numbers was projected for the Indian market too. The first hitch in the largely positive predictions came in 2015, when, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) and UK’s Publishers’ Association reported a dip in the sale of ebooks. Amazon, after launching Kindle Unlimited in September of 2015 in the country, reported later that year that it had tripled its Kindle India business and was looking at a “200% year-on-year” growth. The 2015 Nielsen India Book Market Report said that 70 per cent publishers had digitised their content.
The self-publishing market grew as budding authors could now easily upload their works on platforms like Scribd, Wattpad, Smashwords and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. Content became accessible on more platforms, including smartphones and tablets, especially with the increase in their screen sizes.
And gradually, the ebooks market did grow. Indian publishers predicted that over the next few years ebooks would contribute to between 15-20 per cent of their total revenue, tracing the path that publishers had seen internationally. Perhaps this was how they’d get back the readers they were losing to the screen. Would ebooks cannibalise the space and sale of physical books? Interestingly, despite ebooks posing a threat to brick and mortar bookstores, Indian publishers largely thought of the format as just another platform to capture their tech-savvy young readers. Of course, with this movement came both the concerns and the challenges associated with it.
By November Flipkart too started selling its own ebooks. The Kindle’s entry in the Indian market meant that the movement had well and truly reached us. Before that, Indians looking to own a Kindle had to have the device internationally shipped and sometimes pay up to $80 in shipping and import fee deposits alone. Neither could really make their mark though, and with the gradual rise of smartphones and tablets, both exited the market before 2012 rolled around.Īnd then, in the August of 2012, Amazon first made the Kindle available in India, at the starting price of Rs. Infibeam’s Pi hit the market in the early 2010 and EC Media’s Wink was launched later that same year. Would a device that offered you a reading experience devoid of all these aspects really work? There were doubts.Īnd yet, the idea caught on, and before long, India had launched its own set of e-readers. The most common question was – ‘Why would we read on this?’ A publisher I spoke to remembers how, when confronted by the e-reader, panel discussions across the country emphasised on the tactility of the book – the touch, the smell and the pleasure of turning the page. “I was blown away by the fact that I could flip a book! I kept flipping and flipping the book for so many minutes that Ravi took it away from me for the fear that I might do it some damage.”īut as it is with almost every new technology, the e-reader had its share of critics, and not everyone was quite as impressed. That was the first time I’d handled one”, recalls Arpita Das, the co-founder of Yoda Press. “In 2009, on an editor’s trip organised by the German Book Office, I was taking a train from Munich to Berlin with Ravi DeeCee (managing partner of DC Books), who had a Kindle with him. Soon, other e-readers like Barnes & Nobles’ Nook and the Kobo eReader would follow, launching in 20 respectively (the iPad was launched at the start of 2010 as well). The sheer convenience… it was revolutionary!”Ī year later, and exactly ten years ago from today, Amazon’s Kindle launched in the US, both beginning, and spearheading the ebook movement.
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“I very vividly remember seeing the first ebook download onto it. “My then colleague from the US had the device”, recounts Padmanabham. It seemed like reading was at the brink of changing at a very fundamental level.Īnanth Padmanabhan, the CEO of HarperCollins India (HCI), was there too. It was back in 2006 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest trade fair for books, that a lot of Indian publishers first heard about an e-reader, picking up on the buzz around the newly-launched Sony E-Reader, one of the first to use the famous E-Ink technology.