Go by the e-Book

With the advent of e-books in India,many readers are wondering if the era of physical,paper books — when you curled up with a paperback or hard-bound volume — is drawing to a close. E-books,a popular concept in the West,has found supporters among young,tech-savvy bibliophiles in India. Statistics please.

Vikram Khosla of Hookedonbook.com,an online library,informs that he recently attended a seminar where he found out that last year in the US,more than one-fifth of the population read e-books. “I think,we will soon see a similar trend here,” he adds. The recent Delhi Book Fair had e-books as its main theme,with online publishers and publications,programmes and applications participating from all over the world. Most major publishing houses in India are releasing or planning to release e-book versions of their titles. Kapil Kapoor,Director,Sales and Marketing,Roli Books,says,“The e-book market is nascent in India right now,but we have started publishing every new title as an e-book from last year. There is a very small,niche market for them.”

The business of e-books is not as simple as downloading free reading material. “The first job for any e-book publisher is to make sure that the copy is secure. Even though piracy is rampant,both in physical books as well as soft copies,e-books are more vulnerable to copying,sharing and uploading on the world wide web,” says Ananth Padmanabhan,Vice-President,Sales,Penguin India.

The rising popularity of e-books inevitably raises sighs of nostalgia — can anything replace the joy of reading a physical book — and sarcasm — doesn’t the concept of coffee and an e-book sound absolutely romantic? But,Tanya Menon,a 20-year old Mathematics student from Delhi University,has a point when she says,“I need scores of new books every semester,and it is impossible for me to carry them around. That’s why I prefer buying e-books and reading them on my Kindle.” Thomas Abraham,MD,Hachette India,agrees. “If you get past the tactile/olfactory experience of paper,an e-book has benefits for older generation as well. You can carry multiple books in a slim lightweight device,you can magnify the text to a larger print and,with linked-in browsers devices,you can look up the references right there,” he says. According to Padmanabhan,e-books are generally preferred by readers to read out-of-print books,works by little-known authors and commercial fiction.

Young readers often comment on the steep price tags of e-readers and iPads but the sales are rising. As Caroline Newbury,VP,marketing and publicity,Random House India,says,“The increasing availability of e-book readers —

with the arrival of Kindle in Croma stores recently — does mean that e-books are entering the public consciousness more than ever.”