The problem with the debate over parallel imports is that it has, inevitably, pitted the interests of readers, students and academics against the interests of authors, publishers, and well, readers again. As someone who might write books at some point, and who's worked in the publishing industry, I was very glad to hear that the controversial 2(m) amendment had been dropped. The parallel imports debate is a complex one, and here is a link to old posts on Akhond that cover the entire debate:
Three posts on the parallel imports debate:
Here is a link to a piece in Mint that explains the position from the other side, from the point of view of students and readers:
But much of the debate has ignored the unpleasant realities that drive the publishing industry. The first is that the Indian publishin industry does not operate in isolation; as I and several others have argued, there is no benefit and a great deal of harm in opening up our markets one-way, without being able to access the great souks of the West in an equivalent fashion. The second is that it doesn't make sense to treat academic and trade publishing as the same kind of beast, and assume that laws that are good for one sector will be good for the other. They operate in very different ways, and part of the problem here is that what might work in the textbooks/ academic sector does not work at all for trade publishing and for mainstream fiction/ non-fiction writers.
I'm relieved that 2(m) has been dropped, but I also hope that this will start a longer and more complex debate on parallel imports, and what we can do to bring better books more cheaply to Indian readers--without killing off what is still an emerging English language publishing industry.
Showing posts with label Indian publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian publishing. Show all posts
Monday, September 05, 2011
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Speaking Volumes: Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim
(Published in the Business Standard, May 31, 2011)
Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”
There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.
This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.
Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”
Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.
For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.
TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.
Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.
It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.
The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.
Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”
There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.
This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.
Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”
Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.
For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.
TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.
Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.
It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.
The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Parallel imports (3): From the publishing industry
(The debate over parallel imports is a matter of public interest--it affects readers, writers and the publishing industry. This is why the publishing industry thinks the 2m amendment will be bad for business--copyright lawyers have had a very different perspective. To follow the debate, read back on Divya Dubey's blog: here, here, here and here. Previous posts on Akhond: here and here--interesting debate in the comments.)
Copyright Amendment & Proviso 2m: A response from the Publishing Industry
Introduction
India is the third largest publishing nation hub in the world today after the US and UK. There are over 17,000 publishers in India and, given the spread of English-medium education, it is estimated that over half of them deal with English language publishing. English is the language of pan-national education, commerce & business, law, official transaction and indeed literature; and plays a significant part in India’s new found global stature. Publishing has two strands—educational and trade (general/consumer). Both have contributed immensely to India’s growth as well as cultural development. While writing and publishing in English have had a century old tradition, it is essentially the last two decades that have seen the industry come into its own. A large reason for this maturity, growth in volumes and revenue has been the environment under which publishing and Indian writing has been allowed to flourish—and the single greatest reason has been a secure territory, upholding the concept of territorial copyright and the prohibition of parallel importation.
The Issue
The proposed amendments (to the Copyright Act of 1957), specifically proviso 2m, which uphold the rights of authors in the music and film industries unfortunately hurt book authors with far reaching consequences to the publishing industry and the state of writing. Proviso 2m has no real benefit to anybody outside a segment of importers who, with parallel importation legalized, will be able to freely import any overseas edition to the detriment of local industry, authors and eventually the consumer. The publishing industry—Indian publishers as well as multi-national groups—and authors are together protesting this proviso.
The reasons for the amendment
The following are the main reasons for the proviso that we could discern—(a) the notion that the customer will benefit from lowered prices; (b) the assumption that publishers price too high; (c) the assumption that publishers mainly transact in old editions; and (d) that this will impact mainly imports and only foreign publishers would be complain and (e) that some sort of intangible disharmony exists if copyright is not equated with patents and trademarks. All of these assumptions are unfounded and in many cases blatantly false.
The writing community’s objections (encompassing authors, publishers of every kind—small, large, Indian and foreign owned—and booksellers) have been outlined in the accompanying paper (note from NSR: not carried in this post), but in a nutshell cover:
1. No real drop in prices: India is already the lowest priced market in the world in each publishing segment with price mark-downs ranging from 30% to as much as 90% for educational textbook pricing. These pricing structures have evolved keeping in mind the socio-economic realities of our country. Low as these prices are, they are still vulnerable to remainders and targeted exports which undermine local industry’s ability to compete.
2. Infringing imports will still be cheaper: One rationale for this amendment is that books from overseas are more expensive and therefore incapable of hurting local lower priced editions. This is completely untrue if one studies the dynamics of publishing. Given that the west is a ‘frontlist’ market (over 85% of shelf space is new books), books on an average have a shelf life of just 3-4 months. India by contrast is still largely a ‘backlist’ market (where established books run on longer) and it is every publisher’s endeavour to create books that backlist. Publishing is a passion and hunch-based business that already functions on a cycle of swings and roundabouts where the successes also cross- subsidize the smaller, niche interest books. Even without remainders, books from the west will inevitably be sent in here at targeted ‘undercut’ price levels that will undermine local Indian publishing investments and therefore writing (with no justifiable long term consumer gains).
3. Notional consumer gain: There will be absolutely no consumer gains in the long run. While parallel importation might result in marginal spoiler pricing in the early stages, it will be seen that after this short phase of undercutting, pricing will eventually stabilize back to the price points that currently exist. But the damage done in the medium and long terms will be immense.
4. Remainders and dumping will kill the market: This is an inevitable process that will result, and will hit authors, publishers and consumers alike. Authors will be hit by loss of royalties and future opportunity; publishing will lose margins and investment power; and booksellers will (due to the indiscriminate flowing in of imports) be forced to change stocking patterns, actually reducing choice; and pricing will be a constantly fluctuating mechanism offering no certainty of best buy.
5. Unjust position for the author: Worldwide wherever full-fledged publishing exists there is territorial copyright that respects the author as copyright holder. 2m will in effect disregard the copyright owner’s wishes by denying them their economic rights and actually putting them in a position of disadvantaged competition with a third party (wholesaler/importer of infringing editions)—which imagines an unjust intellectual property system.
6. Author royalties hit: Remainders will give authors no royalties, and targeted export sales from overseas—now legalized—will result in authors losing royalties by as much as 50%.
7. Local writing hit: It must be emphasized that it is not just authors with international editions but local Indian authors too who will bear the brunt of this as rights potential dwindles, publishing programmes shrink and publishers reduce investments in building authors.
8. Current editions: It can easily be verified that every textbook or trade book has the most current edition released here at the same time and much cheaper than the international price.
9. No scarcity: Any book anybody wants is available either locally or by procurement, and always at a special price.
10. Not about protectionism: Competition does not exist the same way in publishing. Unlike the consumer industries, where a Coke sold is a Pepsi not sold, a Vikram Seth sold is not an Amitav Ghosh unsold.
11. Unanimous opposition from every stakeholder: Publishers—Indian and foreign owned, large and small, educational and trade; booksellers—large chains and small independents; authors—international and Indian; literary agents, and overseas publishing companies are all opposing 2m. The other main stakeholder, the reader or end consumer, as we have shown will be adversely hit in the long run.
12. No reciprocity and mature market: The amendment would remove the level playing field. Indian publishers would not be able to sell their editions abroad, but every overseas English language market would be able to freely sell competing editions into India. India is fast approaching being a mature market with a thriving local Indian industry but would soon lose this. Every mature market that is not just a trading market has territorial copyright—India will soon become the sole exception.
13. Cultural development impacted: Writing and its dissemination (whether educational or trade) plays a major part in the creative and cultural development of any nation; and the ever growing stature of Indian writing (awards, festivals, a burgeoning literary tradition, cutting-edge education) will be severely hit.
14. Cultural sensitivities: Local publishers are bound by local laws and keep in mind cultural sensitivities, religious sentiments and Indian laws while publishing or importing a book; indiscriminate ‘dumpers’ are not.
15. Forex outflows: The standing committee report cites possible savings with reduced royalties outflow whereas the opposite would happen. Much more will flow out with payment for the massively increased imports.
16. Ancillary industry hit: Publishing supports a whole host of small scale businesses like typesetting, printing, proof-reading, copy editing, designing, etc—all of which will be impacted over time.
17. Re-export a huge issue: Currently low priced editions are created by local rights licences and reprint rights. These are granted under the sole condition that these editions stay confined to India and do not flow out to damage parent markets. The amendment leaves this window also open, and should this happen, original rights holders will be reluctant to grant rights and thereby prices will actually go up for educational editions, eventually fostering piracy.
18. Books are significantly different from patented products. Because authors are different from consumer goods inventors who register patents. A cellphone is a cellphone is a cellphone. Yes there will be patented technology differentiators but certainly not the same as each book being a unique creative object, where the creator has ‘enshrined rights’, or at least so the other part of this amendment (films/music) would lead us believe. So why the discrimination against book authors in terms of a complete disregard as to their interest.
19. Not enough consultation with stakeholders or engagement with detail; no substantiation of the assumptions that are driving the lawmaking process. Conversely, legal precedents exist here that have upheld territorial copyright; it is not clear what major lapses have been observed that necessitate proviso 2m, which far from benefitting any of the constituents involved will actually have a hugely adverse impact.
With no credible evidence for any of the assumptions, no clear and irrefutable benefit and looking at the severely damaging repercussions, it is the Industry’s demand that proviso 2m be deleted from the proposed amendments.
***
Copyright Amendment & Proviso 2m: A response from the Publishing Industry
Introduction
India is the third largest publishing nation hub in the world today after the US and UK. There are over 17,000 publishers in India and, given the spread of English-medium education, it is estimated that over half of them deal with English language publishing. English is the language of pan-national education, commerce & business, law, official transaction and indeed literature; and plays a significant part in India’s new found global stature. Publishing has two strands—educational and trade (general/consumer). Both have contributed immensely to India’s growth as well as cultural development. While writing and publishing in English have had a century old tradition, it is essentially the last two decades that have seen the industry come into its own. A large reason for this maturity, growth in volumes and revenue has been the environment under which publishing and Indian writing has been allowed to flourish—and the single greatest reason has been a secure territory, upholding the concept of territorial copyright and the prohibition of parallel importation.
The Issue
The proposed amendments (to the Copyright Act of 1957), specifically proviso 2m, which uphold the rights of authors in the music and film industries unfortunately hurt book authors with far reaching consequences to the publishing industry and the state of writing. Proviso 2m has no real benefit to anybody outside a segment of importers who, with parallel importation legalized, will be able to freely import any overseas edition to the detriment of local industry, authors and eventually the consumer. The publishing industry—Indian publishers as well as multi-national groups—and authors are together protesting this proviso.
The reasons for the amendment
The following are the main reasons for the proviso that we could discern—(a) the notion that the customer will benefit from lowered prices; (b) the assumption that publishers price too high; (c) the assumption that publishers mainly transact in old editions; and (d) that this will impact mainly imports and only foreign publishers would be complain and (e) that some sort of intangible disharmony exists if copyright is not equated with patents and trademarks. All of these assumptions are unfounded and in many cases blatantly false.
The writing community’s objections (encompassing authors, publishers of every kind—small, large, Indian and foreign owned—and booksellers) have been outlined in the accompanying paper (note from NSR: not carried in this post), but in a nutshell cover:
1. No real drop in prices: India is already the lowest priced market in the world in each publishing segment with price mark-downs ranging from 30% to as much as 90% for educational textbook pricing. These pricing structures have evolved keeping in mind the socio-economic realities of our country. Low as these prices are, they are still vulnerable to remainders and targeted exports which undermine local industry’s ability to compete.
2. Infringing imports will still be cheaper: One rationale for this amendment is that books from overseas are more expensive and therefore incapable of hurting local lower priced editions. This is completely untrue if one studies the dynamics of publishing. Given that the west is a ‘frontlist’ market (over 85% of shelf space is new books), books on an average have a shelf life of just 3-4 months. India by contrast is still largely a ‘backlist’ market (where established books run on longer) and it is every publisher’s endeavour to create books that backlist. Publishing is a passion and hunch-based business that already functions on a cycle of swings and roundabouts where the successes also cross- subsidize the smaller, niche interest books. Even without remainders, books from the west will inevitably be sent in here at targeted ‘undercut’ price levels that will undermine local Indian publishing investments and therefore writing (with no justifiable long term consumer gains).
3. Notional consumer gain: There will be absolutely no consumer gains in the long run. While parallel importation might result in marginal spoiler pricing in the early stages, it will be seen that after this short phase of undercutting, pricing will eventually stabilize back to the price points that currently exist. But the damage done in the medium and long terms will be immense.
4. Remainders and dumping will kill the market: This is an inevitable process that will result, and will hit authors, publishers and consumers alike. Authors will be hit by loss of royalties and future opportunity; publishing will lose margins and investment power; and booksellers will (due to the indiscriminate flowing in of imports) be forced to change stocking patterns, actually reducing choice; and pricing will be a constantly fluctuating mechanism offering no certainty of best buy.
5. Unjust position for the author: Worldwide wherever full-fledged publishing exists there is territorial copyright that respects the author as copyright holder. 2m will in effect disregard the copyright owner’s wishes by denying them their economic rights and actually putting them in a position of disadvantaged competition with a third party (wholesaler/importer of infringing editions)—which imagines an unjust intellectual property system.
6. Author royalties hit: Remainders will give authors no royalties, and targeted export sales from overseas—now legalized—will result in authors losing royalties by as much as 50%.
7. Local writing hit: It must be emphasized that it is not just authors with international editions but local Indian authors too who will bear the brunt of this as rights potential dwindles, publishing programmes shrink and publishers reduce investments in building authors.
8. Current editions: It can easily be verified that every textbook or trade book has the most current edition released here at the same time and much cheaper than the international price.
9. No scarcity: Any book anybody wants is available either locally or by procurement, and always at a special price.
10. Not about protectionism: Competition does not exist the same way in publishing. Unlike the consumer industries, where a Coke sold is a Pepsi not sold, a Vikram Seth sold is not an Amitav Ghosh unsold.
11. Unanimous opposition from every stakeholder: Publishers—Indian and foreign owned, large and small, educational and trade; booksellers—large chains and small independents; authors—international and Indian; literary agents, and overseas publishing companies are all opposing 2m. The other main stakeholder, the reader or end consumer, as we have shown will be adversely hit in the long run.
12. No reciprocity and mature market: The amendment would remove the level playing field. Indian publishers would not be able to sell their editions abroad, but every overseas English language market would be able to freely sell competing editions into India. India is fast approaching being a mature market with a thriving local Indian industry but would soon lose this. Every mature market that is not just a trading market has territorial copyright—India will soon become the sole exception.
13. Cultural development impacted: Writing and its dissemination (whether educational or trade) plays a major part in the creative and cultural development of any nation; and the ever growing stature of Indian writing (awards, festivals, a burgeoning literary tradition, cutting-edge education) will be severely hit.
14. Cultural sensitivities: Local publishers are bound by local laws and keep in mind cultural sensitivities, religious sentiments and Indian laws while publishing or importing a book; indiscriminate ‘dumpers’ are not.
15. Forex outflows: The standing committee report cites possible savings with reduced royalties outflow whereas the opposite would happen. Much more will flow out with payment for the massively increased imports.
16. Ancillary industry hit: Publishing supports a whole host of small scale businesses like typesetting, printing, proof-reading, copy editing, designing, etc—all of which will be impacted over time.
17. Re-export a huge issue: Currently low priced editions are created by local rights licences and reprint rights. These are granted under the sole condition that these editions stay confined to India and do not flow out to damage parent markets. The amendment leaves this window also open, and should this happen, original rights holders will be reluctant to grant rights and thereby prices will actually go up for educational editions, eventually fostering piracy.
18. Books are significantly different from patented products. Because authors are different from consumer goods inventors who register patents. A cellphone is a cellphone is a cellphone. Yes there will be patented technology differentiators but certainly not the same as each book being a unique creative object, where the creator has ‘enshrined rights’, or at least so the other part of this amendment (films/music) would lead us believe. So why the discrimination against book authors in terms of a complete disregard as to their interest.
19. Not enough consultation with stakeholders or engagement with detail; no substantiation of the assumptions that are driving the lawmaking process. Conversely, legal precedents exist here that have upheld territorial copyright; it is not clear what major lapses have been observed that necessitate proviso 2m, which far from benefitting any of the constituents involved will actually have a hugely adverse impact.
With no credible evidence for any of the assumptions, no clear and irrefutable benefit and looking at the severely damaging repercussions, it is the Industry’s demand that proviso 2m be deleted from the proposed amendments.
***
Parallel imports (2): Publishing and the 2(m) amendment
(This was a follow-up to the blog post on parallel imports, below; carried in the Business Standard, February 19th. Thomas Abraham and Prof Shamnad Basheer continue the debate over at Divya Dubey's blog, in considerable depth.)
Call this the war of the slogans. On one side, copyright lawyers and the Ministry of Human Resource Development offer the lure of cheaper books for Indian readers. On the other, publishers and authors speak of the death of Indian publishing as we know it.
Section 2(m), a proposed amendment to India’s copyright law that would allow the parallel import of books, is a dry piece of legalese, but it’s sparked a blog war, a flurry of publisher white papers, and a wide debate on copyright and territory.
The rationale is a legally sound one — to align Indian copyright law with Indian patent and trademark law, both of which follow the principle of “international exhaustion”: once a product has been legitimately sold, that product can be resold anywhere in the world without the consent of the owner of the copyright, be that the author or the publisher.
According to the Association of Publishers of India, “This proviso would mean that books published in any country could be freely made available and sold in India, without this amounting to infringement of copyright.”
Theoretically, parallel imports would allow a publisher or a printer who does not hold copyright to an Indian edition of a book to print his or her own editions of the book, under certain conditions, and release them back into the Indian market. There is also a fear among publishers that this might lead to widespread “dumping”, where the market is flooded with cheap, remaindered books.”
When this applies to books, specifically, one side argues that allowing “parallel imports” of books would open up the Indian publishing market to competition and would allow readers access to cheaper books. The other side argues that authors and publishers would suffer, and that in the long run, so would the reader. Thomas Abraham, managing director, Hachette India, states his position succinctly: “This would be the death of publishing and writing as we know it in India — and ironically by a surfeit of books.”
Step back from the rhetoric and the very complex issues involved about the intricacies of copyright law, territoriality in publishing, the book remainders market and book dumping, and here’s how the amendment is likely to affect readers, authors, publishers and booksellers.
Booksellers
Perhaps the sharpest summary comes from Landmark Bookstore’s Madhu Mohan: “As booksellers, we want to give our customers a wider range at a lower price. An open market immediately affords both: the cost of this is that publishers with Indian market rights might suffer. The more significantly affected parties are authors, publishers and readers. If, arguably, territorial rights are not sold, authors might earn lower advances. Publishers who have paid for territorial rights, are not able to get the full benefit of their monies. Readers should welcome the change, because at the outset they will get lower priced books.”
His view is echoed across the bookselling industry, with reactions ranging from indifference to the possible repercussions to cautious alarm — for many booksellers, a weak or damaged Indian publishing industry is also a negative.
Almost all booksellers agree that the short-term benefits of allowing parallel imports would be to lower the price of books. India already has among the lowest-priced English language books in the world, but it would be interesting to see if even lower prices reeled in a different kind of reader. As Mohan points out, book imports would be cheaper; books published in India by Indian or foreign authors would be adversely affected. The long-term scenario is another matter; if the Indian publishing industry is hit hard, we could be flooded with cheap, low-quality remainders, or lose price benefits in the long run.
Authors
For authors, what’s key about the 2(m) amendment is the way in which it would affect the writer’s copyright over his/ her work — and also the shifts it might bring about in the industry in general. Copyright lawyer Nandita Saikia observes that once a publisher effectively loses control over an edition of a book — if competing editions are allowed into the market — “This would significantly diminish the ability of publishers to invest in Indian authors and Indian writing.” From Abraham at Hachette to Chiki Sarkar at Random House to Tata McGraw Hill, there seems to be consensus on this aspect of the amendment.
In contrast, Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society argues strongly in favour of 2(m) and dismantling the “licence raj” that requires booksellers and distributors to have authorisation to import books: “Allowing people to import goods without permissions (with appropriate duties) is taken for granted in all other areas, so why not copyrighted works? After all, it is not the act of publication that gets affected, but the right of exclusive distribution.”
But many authors point out that publishing and bookselling operate differently from other industries, and the dynamics of writing and bookselling are not comparable. Author Amit Varma puts forward the writer’s objections: “As the author of a book, I should have the right to assign the rights to sell my book to any publisher in India that I feel like, and the law should protect that right, and my contract with the publisher. Parallel import obviously makes a mockery of that right, and can deny me significant potential royalties.”
Publishers
At Penguin India, Andrew Phillips is blunt: “We stand firmly against the amendment. Penguin is both a ‘foreign’ publisher and an Indian publisher and we believe it will affect both parts of our business. We don’t believe the effects will be minor — to the contrary, this would have a fundamental impact on the publishing business both for international authors and Indian authors who aspire to be read outside India.”
The publishers’ arguments are complex, but stripped of the technicalities, they rest on the question of territoriality. When publishing worldwide operates on the basis of territorial agreements — authors sell rights to their works for specific regions — opening up the market unilaterally makes little sense. India might open its market, via 2(m), to competing imports and editions; but Indian publishers don’t have the right to sell similar editions of books in the UK or US markets.
In other words, the market would open up only in one direction — and this could diminish Indian publishers’ ability to nurture new writing, release Indian editions of foreign authors, and pay authors significant royalties.
Behind the rhetoric, nothing about this proposed change in copyright laws is simple, and the repercussions for authors and publishers are likely to be both significant and adverse. There’s an interesting parallel in the Australian market, which, like the Indian publishing industry, is thriving but relatively young, and lacks the clout of the formidable US, UK and European markets.
Two years ago, when the move to allow parallel imports of books was discussed in Australia, that discussion was fierce, impassioned and hotly contested. Nor was it limited to the industry; when readers realised that the debate was really over what they would get to read, which authors would benefit or lose out, and how this would impact their intellectual lives, the debate went public.
In the case of Australia, it took a full year of discussion before it was finally decided not to introduce parallel imports for the publishing industry. Whatever the possible adverse effects — or benefits — of parallel imports, we haven’t had that discussion yet in India. It’s a necessary one, and it affects anybody equipped with a mind, a wallet and the ability to walk into a bookstore. This would be a good time to have it, before the law is set in stone.
(Thomas Abraham, MD, Hachette India, responded in a mail that he's given me permission to share:)
It is amazing that we are embarking on lawmaking without one of the questions below being answered conclusively to show that the matter in hand was studied and due diligence done:
1. The assumption that prices will drop and current editions. This presumes that as a norm (enough to necessitate a law) prices are therefore too high and current editions are not available. What evidence exists for this? What are the current price points that exist by segment? Is any segment with common use books higher priced on average than it should be? Can this law succeed in dropping prices? By what estimated levels and with what resultant collateral damage? Is there a single book (whether consumer or educational) that can be cited as example of not being available in India on the same day and much cheaper than abroad?
2. Following from the above, is a 70-90% level drop in pricing from international levels not good enough for textbooks? Why not? Not that publishers want it (subsidies i.e) because they say books for common use are cheap enough, but why can’t the equivalent of the ELBS (a low priced Book scheme that existed between 1960 and 1997 funded by the British Govt) be rolled out again (by the Indian govt. this time) to aid student purchasing (their biggest stated concern)?
3. Assuming the market is opened up: what happens to stocking patterns as remainders flow in? How much do readers benefit? Will the same choice exist?
4. Author’s legal position: How does this affect their rights? If the economic right to exploit their work as they choose is valid, providing the societal need for ‘greater good’ (availability and pricing) is also served, then why is this law necessary?. How can one part of the same law support author revenues (film, music) and the other (books) deny it? What sort of intellectual position is this that puts the author in competition with a wholesaler for their own work (yes with this law a wholesaler will have greater right than the author in controlling the economic rights pertaining to a book in India)?
5. Author royalties hit: Has anybody looked at the question to see --by how much? Why is it bad if authors are derived of rightful income? Should the reader care?
6. Is this just a law that governs foreign imports? Will Indian authors/Indian’ publishers also be hit? how?
7. The dynamics of publishing: why is the 80:20 rule critical to survival and the fostering of literature & cultural development; and why will that be severely hit by this amendment?
8. A section of IPR lawyers support of the amendment flows from a love for uniform law (remove ‘national exhaustion’, bring copyright law on par with patents and trademarks)? Why is it not justified for books? Is the notional elegance of uniform law clouding their ability to see ground reality? Are these legal organizations (some of whom publicly advocate piracy) actually advising the government?
9. The case for Libraries: why can’t the law just address this gap (if it is a gap and can be proved as such) by giving libraries the right to import up to 5 copies for self –use? But why do publishers say direct ordering from abroad would still be a waste of the tax payer’s money?
10. Why are the UK, US, Australia, Canada, S. Africa-- the five biggest English markets following territorial copyright? Why should or shouldn’t we follow the same? Why are Japan and New Zealand not valid markets to emulate? Why is reciprocity not being delivered?
11. Who has looked at impact on ancillary industries—from large scale printers to hole-in-the wall typesetters?
12. On what basis did the standing committee say that foreign exchange outflow will fall since licensing will come down? Why do publishers say the opposite will happen? Why are they (the lawmakers concerned) refusing to read the various representations that have been made, and engage with the detailing?
13. Booksellers: Is there even a mid-term benefit for booksellers? Will the Rs 10-20 average drop (proved statistic right now) bring in more customers? What will happen to any bookstore’s buying/stocking when book prices fluctuate like stock prices? How much will they stock? How much will they invest in a promotion (which means stack-up displays, spending on POS, organizing author events etc)? Do they want a situation where they are permanently calculating that a week later they’ll be forced to drop prices because the neighbouring bookshop is selling it cheaper? So are books to be permanently reduced to a month long window?
14. Any book can flow in violating local libel, sedition, defamation laws (let’s not forget “religious sentiments”) and be discovered after the fact. How will you hold anybody liable for violating Indian law?
15. Why do publishers say that the flow of remainders can’t be addressed by anti-dumping law for books (the way they perhaps can for cellphones or microwave ovens)?
16. Educational publishers are worried about re-export inherent in the wording of 2m and there’s been no clarification. Is the statement of law clear on re-export?
17. Scarcity: why do publishers say that today you can actually get in any book in the world cheaper than buying from Amazon, and in about the same time? Is there any real scarcity?
18. Is there any validity to publishers’ statements that the last 20 years have steadily seen a growth in publishing industry (writing, publishing, intellectual engagement, cultural development) like never before and all of it can come undone by this new law?
19. Look at comparative prices of essentials—the roti, kapada aur makaan argument. Prices of essential commodities are skyrocketing and are higher than developed countries (from onions in London, to a 1 acre plot in Melbourne being cheaper than a Gurgaon apartment, to petrol in almost any country). Is this then the priority of govt. needs to follow (to make John Grisham cheaper by Rs 15?)?
20. The existing environment under which publishers’ exist—rampant piracy, low reading habits, hugely lowered prices and bad credit cycles. Rather than fixing those to foster reading (which every major country is investing in for the next generation), do we need 2m?
Call this the war of the slogans. On one side, copyright lawyers and the Ministry of Human Resource Development offer the lure of cheaper books for Indian readers. On the other, publishers and authors speak of the death of Indian publishing as we know it.
Section 2(m), a proposed amendment to India’s copyright law that would allow the parallel import of books, is a dry piece of legalese, but it’s sparked a blog war, a flurry of publisher white papers, and a wide debate on copyright and territory.
The rationale is a legally sound one — to align Indian copyright law with Indian patent and trademark law, both of which follow the principle of “international exhaustion”: once a product has been legitimately sold, that product can be resold anywhere in the world without the consent of the owner of the copyright, be that the author or the publisher.
According to the Association of Publishers of India, “This proviso would mean that books published in any country could be freely made available and sold in India, without this amounting to infringement of copyright.”
Theoretically, parallel imports would allow a publisher or a printer who does not hold copyright to an Indian edition of a book to print his or her own editions of the book, under certain conditions, and release them back into the Indian market. There is also a fear among publishers that this might lead to widespread “dumping”, where the market is flooded with cheap, remaindered books.”
When this applies to books, specifically, one side argues that allowing “parallel imports” of books would open up the Indian publishing market to competition and would allow readers access to cheaper books. The other side argues that authors and publishers would suffer, and that in the long run, so would the reader. Thomas Abraham, managing director, Hachette India, states his position succinctly: “This would be the death of publishing and writing as we know it in India — and ironically by a surfeit of books.”
Step back from the rhetoric and the very complex issues involved about the intricacies of copyright law, territoriality in publishing, the book remainders market and book dumping, and here’s how the amendment is likely to affect readers, authors, publishers and booksellers.
Booksellers
Perhaps the sharpest summary comes from Landmark Bookstore’s Madhu Mohan: “As booksellers, we want to give our customers a wider range at a lower price. An open market immediately affords both: the cost of this is that publishers with Indian market rights might suffer. The more significantly affected parties are authors, publishers and readers. If, arguably, territorial rights are not sold, authors might earn lower advances. Publishers who have paid for territorial rights, are not able to get the full benefit of their monies. Readers should welcome the change, because at the outset they will get lower priced books.”
His view is echoed across the bookselling industry, with reactions ranging from indifference to the possible repercussions to cautious alarm — for many booksellers, a weak or damaged Indian publishing industry is also a negative.
Almost all booksellers agree that the short-term benefits of allowing parallel imports would be to lower the price of books. India already has among the lowest-priced English language books in the world, but it would be interesting to see if even lower prices reeled in a different kind of reader. As Mohan points out, book imports would be cheaper; books published in India by Indian or foreign authors would be adversely affected. The long-term scenario is another matter; if the Indian publishing industry is hit hard, we could be flooded with cheap, low-quality remainders, or lose price benefits in the long run.
Authors
For authors, what’s key about the 2(m) amendment is the way in which it would affect the writer’s copyright over his/ her work — and also the shifts it might bring about in the industry in general. Copyright lawyer Nandita Saikia observes that once a publisher effectively loses control over an edition of a book — if competing editions are allowed into the market — “This would significantly diminish the ability of publishers to invest in Indian authors and Indian writing.” From Abraham at Hachette to Chiki Sarkar at Random House to Tata McGraw Hill, there seems to be consensus on this aspect of the amendment.
In contrast, Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society argues strongly in favour of 2(m) and dismantling the “licence raj” that requires booksellers and distributors to have authorisation to import books: “Allowing people to import goods without permissions (with appropriate duties) is taken for granted in all other areas, so why not copyrighted works? After all, it is not the act of publication that gets affected, but the right of exclusive distribution.”
But many authors point out that publishing and bookselling operate differently from other industries, and the dynamics of writing and bookselling are not comparable. Author Amit Varma puts forward the writer’s objections: “As the author of a book, I should have the right to assign the rights to sell my book to any publisher in India that I feel like, and the law should protect that right, and my contract with the publisher. Parallel import obviously makes a mockery of that right, and can deny me significant potential royalties.”
Publishers
At Penguin India, Andrew Phillips is blunt: “We stand firmly against the amendment. Penguin is both a ‘foreign’ publisher and an Indian publisher and we believe it will affect both parts of our business. We don’t believe the effects will be minor — to the contrary, this would have a fundamental impact on the publishing business both for international authors and Indian authors who aspire to be read outside India.”
The publishers’ arguments are complex, but stripped of the technicalities, they rest on the question of territoriality. When publishing worldwide operates on the basis of territorial agreements — authors sell rights to their works for specific regions — opening up the market unilaterally makes little sense. India might open its market, via 2(m), to competing imports and editions; but Indian publishers don’t have the right to sell similar editions of books in the UK or US markets.
In other words, the market would open up only in one direction — and this could diminish Indian publishers’ ability to nurture new writing, release Indian editions of foreign authors, and pay authors significant royalties.
Behind the rhetoric, nothing about this proposed change in copyright laws is simple, and the repercussions for authors and publishers are likely to be both significant and adverse. There’s an interesting parallel in the Australian market, which, like the Indian publishing industry, is thriving but relatively young, and lacks the clout of the formidable US, UK and European markets.
Two years ago, when the move to allow parallel imports of books was discussed in Australia, that discussion was fierce, impassioned and hotly contested. Nor was it limited to the industry; when readers realised that the debate was really over what they would get to read, which authors would benefit or lose out, and how this would impact their intellectual lives, the debate went public.
In the case of Australia, it took a full year of discussion before it was finally decided not to introduce parallel imports for the publishing industry. Whatever the possible adverse effects — or benefits — of parallel imports, we haven’t had that discussion yet in India. It’s a necessary one, and it affects anybody equipped with a mind, a wallet and the ability to walk into a bookstore. This would be a good time to have it, before the law is set in stone.
(Thomas Abraham, MD, Hachette India, responded in a mail that he's given me permission to share:)
It is amazing that we are embarking on lawmaking without one of the questions below being answered conclusively to show that the matter in hand was studied and due diligence done:
1. The assumption that prices will drop and current editions. This presumes that as a norm (enough to necessitate a law) prices are therefore too high and current editions are not available. What evidence exists for this? What are the current price points that exist by segment? Is any segment with common use books higher priced on average than it should be? Can this law succeed in dropping prices? By what estimated levels and with what resultant collateral damage? Is there a single book (whether consumer or educational) that can be cited as example of not being available in India on the same day and much cheaper than abroad?
2. Following from the above, is a 70-90% level drop in pricing from international levels not good enough for textbooks? Why not? Not that publishers want it (subsidies i.e) because they say books for common use are cheap enough, but why can’t the equivalent of the ELBS (a low priced Book scheme that existed between 1960 and 1997 funded by the British Govt) be rolled out again (by the Indian govt. this time) to aid student purchasing (their biggest stated concern)?
3. Assuming the market is opened up: what happens to stocking patterns as remainders flow in? How much do readers benefit? Will the same choice exist?
4. Author’s legal position: How does this affect their rights? If the economic right to exploit their work as they choose is valid, providing the societal need for ‘greater good’ (availability and pricing) is also served, then why is this law necessary?. How can one part of the same law support author revenues (film, music) and the other (books) deny it? What sort of intellectual position is this that puts the author in competition with a wholesaler for their own work (yes with this law a wholesaler will have greater right than the author in controlling the economic rights pertaining to a book in India)?
5. Author royalties hit: Has anybody looked at the question to see --by how much? Why is it bad if authors are derived of rightful income? Should the reader care?
6. Is this just a law that governs foreign imports? Will Indian authors/Indian’ publishers also be hit? how?
7. The dynamics of publishing: why is the 80:20 rule critical to survival and the fostering of literature & cultural development; and why will that be severely hit by this amendment?
8. A section of IPR lawyers support of the amendment flows from a love for uniform law (remove ‘national exhaustion’, bring copyright law on par with patents and trademarks)? Why is it not justified for books? Is the notional elegance of uniform law clouding their ability to see ground reality? Are these legal organizations (some of whom publicly advocate piracy) actually advising the government?
9. The case for Libraries: why can’t the law just address this gap (if it is a gap and can be proved as such) by giving libraries the right to import up to 5 copies for self –use? But why do publishers say direct ordering from abroad would still be a waste of the tax payer’s money?
10. Why are the UK, US, Australia, Canada, S. Africa-- the five biggest English markets following territorial copyright? Why should or shouldn’t we follow the same? Why are Japan and New Zealand not valid markets to emulate? Why is reciprocity not being delivered?
11. Who has looked at impact on ancillary industries—from large scale printers to hole-in-the wall typesetters?
12. On what basis did the standing committee say that foreign exchange outflow will fall since licensing will come down? Why do publishers say the opposite will happen? Why are they (the lawmakers concerned) refusing to read the various representations that have been made, and engage with the detailing?
13. Booksellers: Is there even a mid-term benefit for booksellers? Will the Rs 10-20 average drop (proved statistic right now) bring in more customers? What will happen to any bookstore’s buying/stocking when book prices fluctuate like stock prices? How much will they stock? How much will they invest in a promotion (which means stack-up displays, spending on POS, organizing author events etc)? Do they want a situation where they are permanently calculating that a week later they’ll be forced to drop prices because the neighbouring bookshop is selling it cheaper? So are books to be permanently reduced to a month long window?
14. Any book can flow in violating local libel, sedition, defamation laws (let’s not forget “religious sentiments”) and be discovered after the fact. How will you hold anybody liable for violating Indian law?
15. Why do publishers say that the flow of remainders can’t be addressed by anti-dumping law for books (the way they perhaps can for cellphones or microwave ovens)?
16. Educational publishers are worried about re-export inherent in the wording of 2m and there’s been no clarification. Is the statement of law clear on re-export?
17. Scarcity: why do publishers say that today you can actually get in any book in the world cheaper than buying from Amazon, and in about the same time? Is there any real scarcity?
18. Is there any validity to publishers’ statements that the last 20 years have steadily seen a growth in publishing industry (writing, publishing, intellectual engagement, cultural development) like never before and all of it can come undone by this new law?
19. Look at comparative prices of essentials—the roti, kapada aur makaan argument. Prices of essential commodities are skyrocketing and are higher than developed countries (from onions in London, to a 1 acre plot in Melbourne being cheaper than a Gurgaon apartment, to petrol in almost any country). Is this then the priority of govt. needs to follow (to make John Grisham cheaper by Rs 15?)?
20. The existing environment under which publishers’ exist—rampant piracy, low reading habits, hugely lowered prices and bad credit cycles. Rather than fixing those to foster reading (which every major country is investing in for the next generation), do we need 2m?
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Parallel imports: what readers should know
Just a quick summary of the intense debates around the possibility of opening up the Indian publishing market to "parallel imports". This is in many ways a very technical issue; the proposed amendments to the Indian Copyright laws would allow parallel imports of books in India, and would effectively change the way publishers in the country do their business, the kind of books readers would see in bookstores, and the kind of royalties and exposure Indian authors would receive.
The debate is being framed as "the death of publishing in India" versus "readers should have access to cheaper books and intellectual property should flow freely"; both arguments have some merit and many areas of contention.
Hachette's Thomas Abraham raised the alarm (supported by most of the key players in English-language Indian publishing) in this article in the Hindustan Times:
This drew a response by Rahul Matthan in The Indian Express:
And a blog post at Original Fakes argued for opening up the Indian market, but got many aspects of the Indian publishing industry dead wrong (I'll try and post a full critique later in the week):
(In just this one paragraph, there are three sweeping errors: the assumption that piracy benefits readers--book pirates aren't interested in hawking copies of GV Desani or Kolatkar's Jejuri, they're busy selling ersatz copies of Paulo Coelho and Aravind Adiga; that there is some conspiracy to price English language books higher than regional-language books (the difference lies in the fact that the print, binding, design and paper quality are usually more expensive than in regional language publishing, and I would be hard pressed to find books of "identical print quality" in these very distinct markets); and that this new amendment would work well for readers and authors.)
The interesting thing is that this debate has been played out before, in almost exactly the same terms--in Australia. There are some similarities between the Australian and Indian markets, in English language publishing. Both have a wide local pool of readers, but a smaller pool than, say, the UK or European markets--the average print runs for books in Australia and in India would be much smaller than the average print run in the UK or the US, though these numbers have been steadily increasing over the last 15 years. Both have to compete to sell rights of local authors in the Western, UK and US-dominated marketplace, and publishers in both countries have often complained that these markets are only interested in a certain kind of literature. Both markets have shown great growth in the last 10-15 years, but are still not independent enough to thrive without access to the big souks of the US, the UK and Europe.
Anyway, to cut to the debate. This blog post, made in 2008 at the Australian Writers Marketplace, covers most of the points we're discussing in India:
I think this covers the basic problem with allowing parallel imports--quite apart from the fear publishers have expressed of India being turned into a giant remainder bin. The problem is that this law goes one way; we open up our markets, without having similar and equal access to the markets of the US and the UK. I just don't see how this will benefit authors and publishers--and if there is any benefit to readers, it will be exceedingly short-term.
I'll try to explain why later, either in next week's column for the Business Standard or in a more detailed post. But for the moment, think about this: this is not a simple open-up-the-market-so-that-readers-can-buy-cheaper-books situation. In theory and in practice, the rise of ebooks will force a rethink worldwide about the territorial model of publishing, where publishers buy and own the rights to sell books in a specific geographical area. At this point, though, the global publishing marketplace operates on the territorial model, for better or for worse. The UK isn't opening up its markets to Indian publishers, neither is the US. To unilaterally open up our markets without thinking about the consequence could seriously hurt authors--who lose out on royalties--and set back the gains Indian publishing in the English language arena has made in the last 15 years.
If anyone thinks readers will benefit in this situation, they need to take a long hard look at the realities of the publishing marketplace--or to think about the kind of books they would find in bookstores if booksellers no longer have an incentive to source anything but cheap bestsellers or editions of books that undercut the original Indian edition.
Update: Thomas Abraham responds to the Original Fakes blogpost (thank you, Thomas, now I don't have to write my rebuttal!):
The debate is being framed as "the death of publishing in India" versus "readers should have access to cheaper books and intellectual property should flow freely"; both arguments have some merit and many areas of contention.
Hachette's Thomas Abraham raised the alarm (supported by most of the key players in English-language Indian publishing) in this article in the Hindustan Times:
"So what exactly is proviso 2m and why are writers-publishers so incensed about it? Simply put, the proviso seeks to remove the protection that India had as a copyright territory. Any book published anywhere in the world can now be sold here infringing an exclusive Indian edition — published or imported. To understand this, one needs to realise that authors own copyright to their works and then assign publishing rights to different territories, so that the book and readers are best served. Vikram Seth, for example, is published in Britain by Hachette, in the US by HarperCollins, in Canada by McArthur, and by Penguin in India. Each territory is protected by law to best publish the work. Without this legal shield, any of the four editions could infringe on each other.
So why is the HRD ministry doing this? Baffling as it is, (since it demonstrates no due diligence and a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of the publishing) let’s look at possible reasons:
The ‘It benefits the end consumer because open market competition will bring prices down’ argument: This is rubbish because India is the lowest priced market in the world, and no benefit outside short-term spoiler pricing can accrue to the customer. Quoth jesting Pilate,“If India is the lowest priced market surely publishers have nothing to worry about!” Not true! Here one needs to understand how business is done around the world. Almost all world markets practise what’s known as ‘remainder’ sales. Essentially surplus stock is cleared-off at ‘raddi’ prices. (I kid you not.—Books are sold by the roomful or by weight!) These stocks, if not prohibited by law, will just flow in and wipe out local editions and eventually industry.
Will the end customer get this any cheaper? No, not really, because we have the occasional remainder trickle now and know pricing patterns. Remainder merchants still sell these just below existing price points to maximise their own profits. In any case that can’t surely be the rationale in a country that prides itself on culture and learning — that we turn India into a remainder bin?"
This drew a response by Rahul Matthan in The Indian Express:
"Seen in this light, the opposition to the proposed amendment is quite obviously protectionist, allowing publishers to artificially extend their monopoly over the works they have licensed at the cost of the readers they are supposed to serve. As a result, consumers are denied access to new and fresh intellectual property and the breadth of choice that the more mature markets have to offer. What’s more, readers are denied the pricing choices that exist in developed markets which allow them to choose to either pay more for fresh content, or forgo the pleasure of buying the latest book as it comes out in exchange for an eventual reduction in price."
And a blog post at Original Fakes argued for opening up the Indian market, but got many aspects of the Indian publishing industry dead wrong (I'll try and post a full critique later in the week):
"As I have written elsewhere, I owe my education in English entirely to low-cost editions of books bought from pirate street vendors or less-frequently at second hand bookstores (who typically would stock books imported from overseas library sales). So I’m eagerly anticipating the changes this new amendment promises to unleash – more of the same. (Aside, officially sold English books in India have always been much more highly priced than vernacular books of identical print quality – prompting us to speculate who pockets the difference. And why. The interests of the reading public or the author are very far removed in this calculus.)"
(In just this one paragraph, there are three sweeping errors: the assumption that piracy benefits readers--book pirates aren't interested in hawking copies of GV Desani or Kolatkar's Jejuri, they're busy selling ersatz copies of Paulo Coelho and Aravind Adiga; that there is some conspiracy to price English language books higher than regional-language books (the difference lies in the fact that the print, binding, design and paper quality are usually more expensive than in regional language publishing, and I would be hard pressed to find books of "identical print quality" in these very distinct markets); and that this new amendment would work well for readers and authors.)
The interesting thing is that this debate has been played out before, in almost exactly the same terms--in Australia. There are some similarities between the Australian and Indian markets, in English language publishing. Both have a wide local pool of readers, but a smaller pool than, say, the UK or European markets--the average print runs for books in Australia and in India would be much smaller than the average print run in the UK or the US, though these numbers have been steadily increasing over the last 15 years. Both have to compete to sell rights of local authors in the Western, UK and US-dominated marketplace, and publishers in both countries have often complained that these markets are only interested in a certain kind of literature. Both markets have shown great growth in the last 10-15 years, but are still not independent enough to thrive without access to the big souks of the US, the UK and Europe.
Anyway, to cut to the debate. This blog post, made in 2008 at the Australian Writers Marketplace, covers most of the points we're discussing in India:
"However, Bernard Keane has weighed in at Crikey with the argument that the Australian publishing industry should essentially get over it. Software and music import restrictions have fallen, and he asks why books should be any different.
Australian publishers, like other beneficiaries of media regulation like the FTA TV networks and music companies, have had to watch as their fortresses of protectionism have been bypassed by the internet, with consumers exercising the power it hands them to get what they want when they want it, legally or illegally. With a strong Australia-US exchange rate, there’s never been a better time to buy GST-free books from Amazon.
Keane goes on to argue that import regulation is actually a lack of trust in the Australian consumer, that publishers do not believe Australians will buy Australian stories, and the industry must be regulated to keep sales of Australian literature up. He compares it to the broadcasting industry’s Australian Content Requirements, and the theory that Australians wouldn’t watch Australian TV shows if the industry wasn’t forced to make them.
However, it’s not just about the content. Garth Nix makes an incredibly important point in his letter, one which should probably be the sticking point to the entire debate:
I am surprised there is support for an “open” market in Australia because it would be no such thing. It would actually be a “surrendered” market. The entire publishing world still works on the basis of territorial copyright and it will do so for a long time to come, despite electronic editions and the Internet, of which I will have more to say down the page. This is particularly the case with English language publishing. The USA and the UK have actually been strengthening their respective book copyright regimes, not surrendering them. What is “open” about Australian-published books not being able to be sold in the USA or the UK, but American, British or any other English-language edition from anywhere being able to be freely sold here?
Perhaps I’m missing the point, but why should we accept American and British versions of our books, when they won’t do the same?"
I think this covers the basic problem with allowing parallel imports--quite apart from the fear publishers have expressed of India being turned into a giant remainder bin. The problem is that this law goes one way; we open up our markets, without having similar and equal access to the markets of the US and the UK. I just don't see how this will benefit authors and publishers--and if there is any benefit to readers, it will be exceedingly short-term.
I'll try to explain why later, either in next week's column for the Business Standard or in a more detailed post. But for the moment, think about this: this is not a simple open-up-the-market-so-that-readers-can-buy-cheaper-books situation. In theory and in practice, the rise of ebooks will force a rethink worldwide about the territorial model of publishing, where publishers buy and own the rights to sell books in a specific geographical area. At this point, though, the global publishing marketplace operates on the territorial model, for better or for worse. The UK isn't opening up its markets to Indian publishers, neither is the US. To unilaterally open up our markets without thinking about the consequence could seriously hurt authors--who lose out on royalties--and set back the gains Indian publishing in the English language arena has made in the last 15 years.
If anyone thinks readers will benefit in this situation, they need to take a long hard look at the realities of the publishing marketplace--or to think about the kind of books they would find in bookstores if booksellers no longer have an incentive to source anything but cheap bestsellers or editions of books that undercut the original Indian edition.
Update: Thomas Abraham responds to the Original Fakes blogpost (thank you, Thomas, now I don't have to write my rebuttal!):
There are essentially two views—according to us, we as publishers have a certain viewpoint founded in experience, knowledge of the markets while the lawyers (or more specifically this group of three cited here) have a viewpoint founded mainly in abstract theory—an ideal construct (ideal in their notion of a harmonious statement of law—which however has no engagement with practicalities, and chooses to ignore fundamental questions).
Each iteration has put forward a fresh round of erroneous assumptions—it started with this being just something foreign publishers wanted (that notion amazingly still persists below despite statements by all to the contrary), then the boldly stated fact that author royalties will not be impacted…and the persistent delusion that the consumer will benefit. No direct data or credible evidence anywhere.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
The BS column: Damning the Oriental scene
The Booker: It’s so tempting to pin the Indian obsession with the Booker on Arundhati Roy, whose win in 1997 for God of Small Things sparked off the great Indian Booker gold rush. (Blaming Arundhati is now a small cottage industry in its own right, so she may as well take the rap for the Booker. It’s a more interesting crime than hating on the US, sympathizing with the Maoists and never writing a sentence if she can get away with a paragraph.)
But the truth is it’s our fault. If we’re losing interest in the Booker this year because Rushdie didn’t make it to the longlist and there isn’t another Indian/ Asian contender, perhaps we need to ask when we became such insular readers. A century ago, the first Indian writers to claim English as one of their own languages read broadly; their imaginations were fired by their counterparts in Russia, Europe and America. A generation ago, Amitav Ghosh chronicled the practice of using the list of Nobel literature laureates as a kind of reader’s guide—a dreary but worthy way of inviting the world onto one’s bookshelves. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a preoccupation with literary success; it’s an unhealthy self-obsession.
Raise the bar already: One of the reasons why the US and much of Europe consistently produce better literary fiction—more interesting debut novels, more polished short story and essay collections, stellar non-fiction—is that it’s not that easy to get published.
About a decade ago, the hegemony of Penguin India in mainstream publishing gave way to intense competition as four or five publishing houses came up in its wake. This should have led to better work, and better edited books, but what it unleashed instead was a flood of superficial writing that might best be called fake literature, as editors struggled to meet their commissioning quotas.
I’m just as guilty as anyone else in publishing; in my stint at a major publishing house, we played the volumes versus quality game, and as with most other houses, quality sometimes lost. It’s time for publishers to start being gatekeepers again, to step away from the mediocre, the easy successes, the frozen-pizza school of writing—easy to sell, easy to consume, of no nutritional value whatsoever.
Missing: the under-40 “bhasha” generation: (I apologise for using the term bhasha to indicate Indian writers working in languages other than English—it’s terrible but useful shorthand.) Indian writing in English currently suffers from an imbalance—a flurry of literary prizes, the most recent being the Hindu Literary Review prize—without sufficient infrastructure in the way of creative writing courses and writing residencies.
Consider the wealth of Indian languages outside the narrow bandwidth of English—and consider the fact that the two most prominent literary prizes, the Sahitya Akademi awards and the Jnanpith, are reserved for writers in the autumn of their lives. When Ravindra Kelekar received his Jnanpith this week, he spoke of the neglect of Indian-language literature, and of his sense that English crowded out the rest. But in all these decades of complaining about the imbalance, the bhasha literary establishment has done little to encourage young writers, to offer them the early recognition and wider readership that a good first book prize could bring in its wake.
The invisible India: One of the annoying side-effects of living in a world where English is the link language, and where your publishing souks are based in the West, is living with the fact that every now and then, the UK and the US media will discover the obvious.
The success of the Bengali writer Sankar in translation a few years ago offered readers outside India a tiny sliver of what they were missing by reading only Indian writing in English, not Indian writing in translation—akin to reading only Portuguese literature and assuming it stands for all of European literature. It’s been a long time since Adil Jussawalla’s monumental anthology, New Writing in India, or Amit Chaudhuri’s Picador anthology of Indian writing—an updated anthology of Indian writing is overdue.
This year has seen the discovery by the UK media of Dalit writing, and perhaps similar discoveries, even if they seem obvious to those of us who live and work here, will open up the invisible India for the West. If Indian publishers were able to sponsor and aggressively market really good translations, they could change the game.
(Published in the Business Standard, August 2010)
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
The Business Standard column: Copyright, copywrong?
(Published in the Business Standard, June 1, 2010)
The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.
Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will never be stocked in Indian bookshops. Many will come in after six-eight months, or will be prohibitively expensive, or will be stocked in limited copies.
For readers, one way around this is to order online or invest in an e-reader, but that’s still restrictive—you lose out on the serendipity of browsing, the accidental happiness of stumbling across books you didn’t know you wanted. (And as reader Meethil Momayya pointed out in an email, e-books are still subject to territorial agreements.)
From that perspective, the amendments proposed to the Indian Copyright Act might seem like a great idea. The core principle underlying the amendments applies equally to the Internet, digital media, film and broadcasting, and print publishing. Open up the markets, allow books, films and other media to move freely across countries, and give the Indian consumer and reader a much wider choice. So why is Indian publishing unhappy about this, and how is the Indian Copyright Act set to change the way you read?
The publishing perspective: Thomas Abraham, CEO, Hachette India, is blunt: “This will change the face of Indian publishing completely, and disastrously. The worst hit will be the publishers.” His logic, echoed by HarperCollins’ P N Sukumar and Krishan Chopra, is simple. The Act would do away, in effect, with the idea of an Indian “territory”—allowing books to be freely imported, and in the worst case, dumped, in the Indian market. For publishers, the incentive to promote an author or invest in his work in India disappears—if you know that anyone can print and sell copies of the book your publishing house has worked to produce.
Most glaringly, the “open market” is not reciprocal: while US and UK printers could, theoretically, flood the Indian markets with reprints of popular books, copyright agreements in those territories still hold, and Indian publishing cannot do the same. In the long run, this could kill or seriously cripple Indian publishing.
The author’s perspective: While the initial response from authors on the easing of markets is bound to be positive, will they get paid? As happened with the music industry, authors might find that their sales and audiences rise—but they’re not getting royalties on those editions. In a worst-case scenario, if the Act goes through in its present form and the doomsayers are right, the apparent freedoms authors might gain from the easing of copyright restrictions would be offset by the loss of local publishing support. And again, as with the music industry, for authors to gain, they would have to be willing to create book groups, nurture audiences and do much of their spadework. None of this infrastructure exists in India at present.
The reader’s perspective: Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, offers a balanced take. “This is terrible for publishers,” he says. “But readers and retail want more choice and this could offer them more freedom—even at the basic level of being able to buy different editions of the same book.”
The biggest question—unanswered because the Copyright Act is geared far more strongly to the needs of the digital and film worlds, than to the complex and competing needs of print—is how this will work in practice. This could be like the Chinese toy revolution: the insidious replacement of local Indian products with cheaper, more disposable alternatives. Many readers couldn’t care less, so long as they have more and better books to read.
But the other argument is blunt, if protectionist: if you want a thriving Indian publishing industry, flooding the market with cheaper editions of books will kill off the publisher’s incentive to support and nurture authors. This could work if markets were open in the other direction as well—if a reciprocal arrangement allowed Indian publishers to ship their editions of US and UK-produced books into those markets—but there is no way the US and the UK would allow that kind of competition.
Like most Indian readers, I want more choice, and better books; and I don’t want to have to wait months to buy my favourite authors. But however well-intentioned, if the practical implications of the Copyright Act would be to cripple local publishing, that’s bad for readers—and terrible for authors. What works for digital industries and films might have entirely the opposite effect on the publishing world, and it’s not a gamble Indian publishing can afford to lose.
The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.
Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will never be stocked in Indian bookshops. Many will come in after six-eight months, or will be prohibitively expensive, or will be stocked in limited copies.
For readers, one way around this is to order online or invest in an e-reader, but that’s still restrictive—you lose out on the serendipity of browsing, the accidental happiness of stumbling across books you didn’t know you wanted. (And as reader Meethil Momayya pointed out in an email, e-books are still subject to territorial agreements.)
From that perspective, the amendments proposed to the Indian Copyright Act might seem like a great idea. The core principle underlying the amendments applies equally to the Internet, digital media, film and broadcasting, and print publishing. Open up the markets, allow books, films and other media to move freely across countries, and give the Indian consumer and reader a much wider choice. So why is Indian publishing unhappy about this, and how is the Indian Copyright Act set to change the way you read?
The publishing perspective: Thomas Abraham, CEO, Hachette India, is blunt: “This will change the face of Indian publishing completely, and disastrously. The worst hit will be the publishers.” His logic, echoed by HarperCollins’ P N Sukumar and Krishan Chopra, is simple. The Act would do away, in effect, with the idea of an Indian “territory”—allowing books to be freely imported, and in the worst case, dumped, in the Indian market. For publishers, the incentive to promote an author or invest in his work in India disappears—if you know that anyone can print and sell copies of the book your publishing house has worked to produce.
Most glaringly, the “open market” is not reciprocal: while US and UK printers could, theoretically, flood the Indian markets with reprints of popular books, copyright agreements in those territories still hold, and Indian publishing cannot do the same. In the long run, this could kill or seriously cripple Indian publishing.
The author’s perspective: While the initial response from authors on the easing of markets is bound to be positive, will they get paid? As happened with the music industry, authors might find that their sales and audiences rise—but they’re not getting royalties on those editions. In a worst-case scenario, if the Act goes through in its present form and the doomsayers are right, the apparent freedoms authors might gain from the easing of copyright restrictions would be offset by the loss of local publishing support. And again, as with the music industry, for authors to gain, they would have to be willing to create book groups, nurture audiences and do much of their spadework. None of this infrastructure exists in India at present.
The reader’s perspective: Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, offers a balanced take. “This is terrible for publishers,” he says. “But readers and retail want more choice and this could offer them more freedom—even at the basic level of being able to buy different editions of the same book.”
The biggest question—unanswered because the Copyright Act is geared far more strongly to the needs of the digital and film worlds, than to the complex and competing needs of print—is how this will work in practice. This could be like the Chinese toy revolution: the insidious replacement of local Indian products with cheaper, more disposable alternatives. Many readers couldn’t care less, so long as they have more and better books to read.
But the other argument is blunt, if protectionist: if you want a thriving Indian publishing industry, flooding the market with cheaper editions of books will kill off the publisher’s incentive to support and nurture authors. This could work if markets were open in the other direction as well—if a reciprocal arrangement allowed Indian publishers to ship their editions of US and UK-produced books into those markets—but there is no way the US and the UK would allow that kind of competition.
Like most Indian readers, I want more choice, and better books; and I don’t want to have to wait months to buy my favourite authors. But however well-intentioned, if the practical implications of the Copyright Act would be to cripple local publishing, that’s bad for readers—and terrible for authors. What works for digital industries and films might have entirely the opposite effect on the publishing world, and it’s not a gamble Indian publishing can afford to lose.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Pradipta Sarkar's delectable post on 'How not to impress a publisher'. Required reading for anyone with a manuscript in hand and a gun in his pocket.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Publishing in India
(Published in Le Monde, March 2007)
Just over a century after Gutenberg invented movable type, a Jesuit ship stopped off the port of Goa on the Indian coast for provisions. Among its human cargo was a printer; listed on the bill was a printing press intended for Abyssinia. The Portuguese priests of Goa hijacked both press and printer, and set about printing Bibles and missionary tracts.
This was in 1556, and if it hadn’t been for opposition from the existing guilds of calligraphers as well as the missionaries’ reluctance to share what was then state-of-the-art technology, the history of Indian publishing would have been very different. As it happened, printing and publishing never really took off.
As late as 1868, printing presses were so rare that the Oriya writer Fakir Mohan Senapati could describe the excitement caused by the arrival of the first printing press in the state of Orissa (it was brought in by ship and bullock cart). “We joyfully announced that printing would begin. Half of the shops in Motiganj were closed on this auspicious day… The street outside was full of people, and the traffic came to a stop. People from afar kept coming…as if it was as exciting as the Car Festival. Zemindars (landlords) came in palanquins from remote villages to see our press…”
Neither Senapati nor the Jesuit fathers of Goa would recognize the Indian publishing scene today. “80,000 books in 22 Indian languages including English,” boasts 60 Years of Book Publishing in (independent) India, released at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair where India was the guest country.
.
In New Delhi, the Indian capital and the heart of English language publishing, books—many of them pirated copies of bestsellers—are peddled at red lights alongside cheap plastic toys. It’s a distinct if dubious sign of the growing appetite for books among the middle class. A few decades ago, most of Delhi’s publishers were clustered in the crowded roads of Old Delhi, near the monuments where mushairas—gatherings of poets—provided popular entertainment for courtiers and commoners alike.
Now publishing houses can be found all over the city, the geographical distribution reflecting the diversity and challenges that face English language publishers in India. Ravi Singh, CEO of Penguin India—one of the largest and most respected trade publishers in the country—thinks there’s a significant shift in Indian reading habits.
“There’s greater plurality and much less literary snobbery than there used to be ten years ago,” he says, pointing to the explosion of narrative non-fiction. Books like Suketu Mehta’s biography of Bombay, Maximum City, Rahul Bhattacharya’s cricketing odysssey, Pundits from Pakistan or Rajmohan Gandhi’s new look at Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas, reflect the growing interest of Indians in the obsessions of their own country.
Sayoni Basu, chief editor at Scholastic, a children’s book imprint, confirms this: “Today, all novels do not have to be the great Indian novel, dealing with great abstract issues of existence, anxiety, caste and religion. It is okay to write fiction about silly things, funny things--and to write romance and detective novels.”
While HarperCollins, Penguin and, in academic publishing, Oxford University Press have been in India for a while now, there’s also been growing interest from other foreign publishers. Random House has just set up an office in India, Simon & Schuster is testing the waters and several other publishers have plans for the Indian market.
Urvashi Butalia, a publishing veteran and founder of a key feminist press, now runs Zubaan, a feminist publishing house. She offers her perspective: “Barely had Indian publishers begun to make their mark, after an initial situation of being dominated by the big four or five (OUP, Longman Green, Macmillan, Blackie and Son) that the political setup changed and foreign houses are coming in. So one challenge is from the competition that these houses can offer, and the other is to fight the still persistent, even though somewhat residual, sense of 'foreign is better'.”
Local publishing houses like Roli Books, who have a fine line in coffee table books, and the venerable Rupa & Co, do well, though, and it isn’t always easy for foreign publishing houses to deal with the quirky conditions in the Indian market.
“It’s silly season in English-language Indian publishing,” says Penguin’s Ravi Singh. “The whole world and its aunt want to set up publishing outfits in India. But things will settle down in a couple of years and you’ll find that good, sensible publishers, whether ‘indigenous’ or aligned to international publishing houses, will continue to thrive.” Anita Roy, a leading editor with Zubaan, thinks that the market is big enough: “India is still an area of great 'book hunger'--there is a lot of room for growth for everyone.”
For publishers in the 21 languages other than English, though, the sense of being ignored by the English-speaking Indian and the rest of the world is strong. Dina M Malhotra, editor of 60 Years of Book Publishing in India, writes of the need to ensure that “the roots of Indian culture are not inundated by the Western influence”.
And the frustration that many publishers prevented by language barriers from being serious players in the global market feel is evident. Malhotra points out that the largest number of books in India are published in Hindi, the national language, not English, and that Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Tamil and Telegu all have strong local markets, but are invisible to the Western reader.
But the biggest question is one that is familiar to European readers: in a country the size of India, with at least 22 vibrant languages, how do you find your readers? And how do you introduce readers familiar with one language to literature written in an unfamiliar tongue, even if they share a common history?
A bestseller in Bengal or Gujarat might sell 60,000 copies on average in India, but has no readers outside the subcontinent or indeed home state. English language publishers grapple with the fact that while bestsellers can run to 50,000 copy print runs, average numbers are abysmally low—print runs of 1,000 or 2,000 copies are the norm.
“In a country of a billion plus people it should be possible to sell at least a million copies of a book. Why is it that we manage to sell only a thousand?” asks Zubaan’s Urvashi Butalia.
In India, where President Kalaam’s poetry sells in bushels at the local cigarette shop, where the dazzling exploits of the dashing Inspector Vinod sell briskly in the Hindi pulp fiction market, and where railway station bookshops in the South sell Malayalam classics alongside Jane Eyre to readers hungry for both, that’s a million-dollar question.
Just over a century after Gutenberg invented movable type, a Jesuit ship stopped off the port of Goa on the Indian coast for provisions. Among its human cargo was a printer; listed on the bill was a printing press intended for Abyssinia. The Portuguese priests of Goa hijacked both press and printer, and set about printing Bibles and missionary tracts.
This was in 1556, and if it hadn’t been for opposition from the existing guilds of calligraphers as well as the missionaries’ reluctance to share what was then state-of-the-art technology, the history of Indian publishing would have been very different. As it happened, printing and publishing never really took off.
As late as 1868, printing presses were so rare that the Oriya writer Fakir Mohan Senapati could describe the excitement caused by the arrival of the first printing press in the state of Orissa (it was brought in by ship and bullock cart). “We joyfully announced that printing would begin. Half of the shops in Motiganj were closed on this auspicious day… The street outside was full of people, and the traffic came to a stop. People from afar kept coming…as if it was as exciting as the Car Festival. Zemindars (landlords) came in palanquins from remote villages to see our press…”
Neither Senapati nor the Jesuit fathers of Goa would recognize the Indian publishing scene today. “80,000 books in 22 Indian languages including English,” boasts 60 Years of Book Publishing in (independent) India, released at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair where India was the guest country.
.
In New Delhi, the Indian capital and the heart of English language publishing, books—many of them pirated copies of bestsellers—are peddled at red lights alongside cheap plastic toys. It’s a distinct if dubious sign of the growing appetite for books among the middle class. A few decades ago, most of Delhi’s publishers were clustered in the crowded roads of Old Delhi, near the monuments where mushairas—gatherings of poets—provided popular entertainment for courtiers and commoners alike.
Now publishing houses can be found all over the city, the geographical distribution reflecting the diversity and challenges that face English language publishers in India. Ravi Singh, CEO of Penguin India—one of the largest and most respected trade publishers in the country—thinks there’s a significant shift in Indian reading habits.
“There’s greater plurality and much less literary snobbery than there used to be ten years ago,” he says, pointing to the explosion of narrative non-fiction. Books like Suketu Mehta’s biography of Bombay, Maximum City, Rahul Bhattacharya’s cricketing odysssey, Pundits from Pakistan or Rajmohan Gandhi’s new look at Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas, reflect the growing interest of Indians in the obsessions of their own country.
Sayoni Basu, chief editor at Scholastic, a children’s book imprint, confirms this: “Today, all novels do not have to be the great Indian novel, dealing with great abstract issues of existence, anxiety, caste and religion. It is okay to write fiction about silly things, funny things--and to write romance and detective novels.”
While HarperCollins, Penguin and, in academic publishing, Oxford University Press have been in India for a while now, there’s also been growing interest from other foreign publishers. Random House has just set up an office in India, Simon & Schuster is testing the waters and several other publishers have plans for the Indian market.
Urvashi Butalia, a publishing veteran and founder of a key feminist press, now runs Zubaan, a feminist publishing house. She offers her perspective: “Barely had Indian publishers begun to make their mark, after an initial situation of being dominated by the big four or five (OUP, Longman Green, Macmillan, Blackie and Son) that the political setup changed and foreign houses are coming in. So one challenge is from the competition that these houses can offer, and the other is to fight the still persistent, even though somewhat residual, sense of 'foreign is better'.”
Local publishing houses like Roli Books, who have a fine line in coffee table books, and the venerable Rupa & Co, do well, though, and it isn’t always easy for foreign publishing houses to deal with the quirky conditions in the Indian market.
“It’s silly season in English-language Indian publishing,” says Penguin’s Ravi Singh. “The whole world and its aunt want to set up publishing outfits in India. But things will settle down in a couple of years and you’ll find that good, sensible publishers, whether ‘indigenous’ or aligned to international publishing houses, will continue to thrive.” Anita Roy, a leading editor with Zubaan, thinks that the market is big enough: “India is still an area of great 'book hunger'--there is a lot of room for growth for everyone.”
For publishers in the 21 languages other than English, though, the sense of being ignored by the English-speaking Indian and the rest of the world is strong. Dina M Malhotra, editor of 60 Years of Book Publishing in India, writes of the need to ensure that “the roots of Indian culture are not inundated by the Western influence”.
And the frustration that many publishers prevented by language barriers from being serious players in the global market feel is evident. Malhotra points out that the largest number of books in India are published in Hindi, the national language, not English, and that Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Tamil and Telegu all have strong local markets, but are invisible to the Western reader.
But the biggest question is one that is familiar to European readers: in a country the size of India, with at least 22 vibrant languages, how do you find your readers? And how do you introduce readers familiar with one language to literature written in an unfamiliar tongue, even if they share a common history?
A bestseller in Bengal or Gujarat might sell 60,000 copies on average in India, but has no readers outside the subcontinent or indeed home state. English language publishers grapple with the fact that while bestsellers can run to 50,000 copy print runs, average numbers are abysmally low—print runs of 1,000 or 2,000 copies are the norm.
“In a country of a billion plus people it should be possible to sell at least a million copies of a book. Why is it that we manage to sell only a thousand?” asks Zubaan’s Urvashi Butalia.
In India, where President Kalaam’s poetry sells in bushels at the local cigarette shop, where the dazzling exploits of the dashing Inspector Vinod sell briskly in the Hindi pulp fiction market, and where railway station bookshops in the South sell Malayalam classics alongside Jane Eyre to readers hungry for both, that’s a million-dollar question.
"Why do you write?"
(Published in Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, January 02, 2007)
This column is dedicated to all the people who patiently answered the question I asked over and over again in 2006: “So why do you want to be a writer?”
There were so many of them out there. Some had done fruitless rounds of publishers’ offices. Some had been published and watched their dreams die slow deaths as the books drew sparse reviews, a handful of readers, bringing them neither the accolades nor the royalties they had imagined would be their due. Some had always intended to be writers, but had been sidetracked along the way by jobs, rent, families.
Most of them will never finish their books; some will finish the great Indian novel and struggle to find a publisher; only a few will find the satisfaction they’re looking for in the writing life. I wanted to know what made them go on, what they got out of the pursuit of a profession with such high failure rates.
Some offered honest, simple answers. “I love telling stories and having stories told to me,” wrote one woman. “It doesn’t matter if I get published or not. I do this for me.” “I read R K Narayan all through childhood and thought I want to write like this, so now I am trying.” “I love writing poetry, even if it sometimes isn’t so good, for me there is a satisfaction to making something out of words. I am in love with words. Publication [sic] is not that important, if even one or two readers like my poems that is enough.”
These, I think, are the lucky ones, and for them a small prayer: may they never lose the innocent joy in their writing, regardless of whether the work is “good” or “bad”. These are the writers who have not yet lost the pleasure of playing with words, who are still in love with what they do.
Some approached writing in the same way that a previous generation approached the legal profession or a management degree. “Indian literature is selling abroad and so this is a good opportunity for the sharp writer,” wrote one. “There are opportunities,” a young man in his twenties told me, “in so many areas if you position correctly: management fiction like Chetan Bhagat’s books is here to stay, so is chick lit and so many other niche positions. So all you need is some facility with the language, a good attitude to marketing, and you can be a writer.” “If you are lucky, then the pay-off is very high, like book advances and prize money, so it is worth it trying,” wrote one woman disarmingly.
These are the new breed, the ones who represent an India always on the lookout for the right business model, where you can learn how to be a writer in the same way that you can learn how to be a doctor—it’s a question, as an MBA graduate working on his first novel put it, of “acquiring the right skill set”. It’s easy to sneer at them, but I think of the many people in previous generations who never even tried to write because it was not a “respectable” calling. Perhaps they will produce commonplace books; perhaps they will produce the solid stuff—decent biographies, good film books, respectable business books—that any healthy publishing industry needs. And perhaps some of them will sit down to write a formula bestseller and surprise themselves by discovering that they really want to write a different kind of book.
And a few burned with an inner flame. “Sometimes I think I will never write a short story that approaches anything by Chekhov,” wrote a writer who is considered one of the best of his generation of Indians, “and I fall into despair. But I can only write like me; and I cannot help but write. I don’t do it for the money, or for the readers; I do it because I would die if I didn’t. I keep trying. I keep failing. And then to go back to my desk and face the wall and try again, and fail again.”
In 2007, we’ll see all three sorts of writers. The ones who write out of an innocent joy, the ones who write with one eye on the market, and the ones who write because they cannot help it. Readers will reject much of this work, like some of it, and love only a very few, very rare books. But I’m glad they’re out there. All of them.
[Coda: A few months later, I became a publisher, and discovered the slush pile. The rest is silence.]
This column is dedicated to all the people who patiently answered the question I asked over and over again in 2006: “So why do you want to be a writer?”
There were so many of them out there. Some had done fruitless rounds of publishers’ offices. Some had been published and watched their dreams die slow deaths as the books drew sparse reviews, a handful of readers, bringing them neither the accolades nor the royalties they had imagined would be their due. Some had always intended to be writers, but had been sidetracked along the way by jobs, rent, families.
Most of them will never finish their books; some will finish the great Indian novel and struggle to find a publisher; only a few will find the satisfaction they’re looking for in the writing life. I wanted to know what made them go on, what they got out of the pursuit of a profession with such high failure rates.
Some offered honest, simple answers. “I love telling stories and having stories told to me,” wrote one woman. “It doesn’t matter if I get published or not. I do this for me.” “I read R K Narayan all through childhood and thought I want to write like this, so now I am trying.” “I love writing poetry, even if it sometimes isn’t so good, for me there is a satisfaction to making something out of words. I am in love with words. Publication [sic] is not that important, if even one or two readers like my poems that is enough.”
These, I think, are the lucky ones, and for them a small prayer: may they never lose the innocent joy in their writing, regardless of whether the work is “good” or “bad”. These are the writers who have not yet lost the pleasure of playing with words, who are still in love with what they do.
Some approached writing in the same way that a previous generation approached the legal profession or a management degree. “Indian literature is selling abroad and so this is a good opportunity for the sharp writer,” wrote one. “There are opportunities,” a young man in his twenties told me, “in so many areas if you position correctly: management fiction like Chetan Bhagat’s books is here to stay, so is chick lit and so many other niche positions. So all you need is some facility with the language, a good attitude to marketing, and you can be a writer.” “If you are lucky, then the pay-off is very high, like book advances and prize money, so it is worth it trying,” wrote one woman disarmingly.
These are the new breed, the ones who represent an India always on the lookout for the right business model, where you can learn how to be a writer in the same way that you can learn how to be a doctor—it’s a question, as an MBA graduate working on his first novel put it, of “acquiring the right skill set”. It’s easy to sneer at them, but I think of the many people in previous generations who never even tried to write because it was not a “respectable” calling. Perhaps they will produce commonplace books; perhaps they will produce the solid stuff—decent biographies, good film books, respectable business books—that any healthy publishing industry needs. And perhaps some of them will sit down to write a formula bestseller and surprise themselves by discovering that they really want to write a different kind of book.
And a few burned with an inner flame. “Sometimes I think I will never write a short story that approaches anything by Chekhov,” wrote a writer who is considered one of the best of his generation of Indians, “and I fall into despair. But I can only write like me; and I cannot help but write. I don’t do it for the money, or for the readers; I do it because I would die if I didn’t. I keep trying. I keep failing. And then to go back to my desk and face the wall and try again, and fail again.”
In 2007, we’ll see all three sorts of writers. The ones who write out of an innocent joy, the ones who write with one eye on the market, and the ones who write because they cannot help it. Readers will reject much of this work, like some of it, and love only a very few, very rare books. But I’m glad they’re out there. All of them.
[Coda: A few months later, I became a publisher, and discovered the slush pile. The rest is silence.]
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