Gained in Translation

THERE8217;S an invisible 8216;Help Wanted8217; sign outside Penguin India8217;s offices. Forget the Shobhaa De Selection, which has just...

THERE8217;S an invisible 8216;Help Wanted8217; sign outside Penguin India8217;s offices. Forget the Shobhaa De Selection, which has just unleashed Indi chick-lit onto the unsuspecting masses, forget even the four Hindi titles with which the publishing major forayed into the heartland. The next breakthrough in Indian fiction, the company8217;s convinced, lies in a big-ticket thriller.

And not of the Bahal or Banker schools either. 8220;Those fell between two stools 8212; they couldn8217;t shed their intellectual leanings altogether,8221; says Penguin India president Thomas Abraham. 8220;We are looking at something that will take on Grisham.8221;

That takes to three the number of countries where Penguin is seeking to go massmarket. In the UK and the US, says Penguin Worldwide CEO John Makinson 8212; in town to launch the Hindi titles, this being the 70-year-old company8217;s first experiment with non-English publishing anywhere in the world 8212; they have already identified the supermarket shelves as one area where they need a much larger presence.

The diversification into Hindi, then, is a hard business decision in a world where English is fast becoming a functional language and books need to sell only 8,000 copies 5,000 of them in paperback to hit the bestseller lists. 8220;We are eyeing the regional markets in China, but we aren8217;t as strong there as we are in India,8221; says Makinson, 50.

In India, adds Abraham, there are plans lined up for Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu; every language, in fact, where there is no conflict of interest with associate companies Bengali, for instance, is one area Penguin will not be venturing into, since it has a tie-up with ABP.

8220;In three-four years, we expect to be sourcing 15 per cent of our turnover from the regional titles, a quarter of which will be original works,8221; says Abraham. 8220;That8217;s about Rs 4-5 crore.8221;

This, in spite of the lower price ranges of the vernacular market: the regional language books are expected to be 25-30 per cent cheaper than their English-language counterparts in a market already notoriously price-sensitive.

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Fresh off a rather controversial restructuring of Penguin UK, Makinson is obviously not one to shy away from hard decisions. That includes, in tune with global trends, outsourcing higher level work for illustrated books division Dorling Kindersley than ever before.

But there are big plans for the education sector, and that8217;s one area where Pearson, Penguin8217;s parent company, has already invested. 8220;If the school textbook area is decentralised, we would like to be in a position to develop and produce texts for Indian students,8221; says Makinson. 8220;That8217;s why we have set up an editorial centre in Chennai.8221;

While textbooks could beat all other segments hollow in the bottomlines, Pearson is already into SafariX Textbooks http://www.safarix.com, an e-venture with leading technical publishers, which allows subscribers to search thousands of reference books simultaneously.

8220;So we aren8217;t worried about e-books as such,8221; says Makinson of the digital bogey that died with the dotcom bust. 8220;What we are concerned about is the use of content as resource, the websites like Amazon that allow you to read excerpts of books for free. We are considering expanding SafariX to cover other segments of consumer publishing 8212; not so much fiction, say, as cookbooks 8212; which will allow people to browse our titles for a fee. Call it an electronic lending library.8221;

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Till that happens, we8217;ll curl up with our favourite paperback. In English. Or Hindi. Or Tamil. Or8230;