DARE.CO.IN
opportunity/publishing
New-age publishing A host of opportunities beckon entrepreneurs in the publishing space, which has moved beyond the realm of printed books
I
f a book is a man’s friend, then Badri Seshadri, K Satyanarayan and R Ananthkumar make plenty of new friends every day. The trio founded New Horizon Media, a Chennai-based publishing house, in February 2004. In the last four years, they have churned out over 700 books in three languages (Tamil, Malayalam and English), and release 30 new titles every month. Not just printed books, the company also publishes e-books and audio-books. “In 2004, our aim was to merely learn the book publishing business in Tamil. If it looked interesting and profitable, we were planning to jump in. We learnt quite a bit,” says Seshadri. Move to the west of the country and you meet Leonard Fernandes and his wife Queenie in Goa, who co-founded CinnamonTeal Print and Publishing, a print-on-demand and editorial services provider. The couple entrepreneurs moved back to India in 2006, after
BHUPESH TRIVEDI
CEO, Chronosphere, a custom publishing firm
We have grown 100% in the last one year in terms of revenues, customer base as well as employees. 34
JULY 2008
/Vimarsh Bajpai spending seven years in the US. They initially started an online bookstore, but were soon flooded with requests from authors seeking to get their works published. “Initially we recommended them to publishers, but the economics of publishing doesn’t afford everybody to be published. So we started our print-on-demand service in August 2007,” says Fernandes. They began with five titles a month. Now, CinnamonTeal publishes 50 titles a week. Both New Horizon and CinnamonTeal reflect the modern face of the Indian publishing business, driven by entrepreneurial spirit. Not just printed books, with technology carving new imprints on our reading habits that have changed with hectic lifestyles, the future also looks bright for the growth of audio books and ebooks that can be loaded on to your laptop and iPods. In this article, DARE looks at some of the opportunities that beckon entrepreneurs in the publish-
DARE/take your pick 1.
Printed books
2.
Custom/Contract publishing
3.
Audio books
4.
E-books
5.
Print-on-demand
DARE/new kids on the block Audio books: These are narratives of books or documents, recorded by voice-over artistes. These are available on CDs, cassettes or in MP3 format. Audio books in the children, non-fiction, and management category are gaining popularity. Apart from Karadi Tales, which is the pioneer in audio books in the country, and New Horizon Media, there are not very many dedicated audio book publishers around. Many audio books are imported and sport a price tag of anything above Rs 300. E-books: These are books available in electronic formats (most popular being pdf) and can be read on a computer, an e-book reader such as Amazon’s Kindle or a mobile device that supports Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or Palm format. A volunteer effort, started in 1971, aimed at digitizing books in the US came to be called Project Gutenberg. Today, there are over 25,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. In total, however, over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources. Print-on-demand: In this process of publishing, a document is printed only when someone orders a copy. Thus , commission of the publisher depends on the demand for the book/document. As offset publishers assess the cost of printing, marketing etc before agreeing to publish a work, many authors are turned down by them. Many of those approach PoD publishers, who print only limited copies. Custom/Contract publishing: As the name suggests, this form of publishing is done exclusively for a targeted reader, and is aimed at delivering a clear marketing message. As cost and clutter of advertising is going up, most companies prefer to reach out to their end-customers through magazines, pamphlets, newsletters etc and thus give contracts to publishers for tailor-made documents. While the print-on-demand concept has more to do with the volumes of the print, custom publishing is more about design, number of pages and size of the document.