India has extraordinary human capital with regard to IT development. This has enabled it to build up a thriving industry of publishing services and online platforms that can compete against the US giants themselves for variety and dynamism. Among traditional publishers, digital is often seen as an interesting opportunity, although it is not without its [...]
Presentation
Technical data
Surface area: 3,287,595 km² Population: 1,155,347,678 (2009) Urban population: 66.9% (2009) Language: Hindi is the official language. Each state and territory of the Indian nation has its own official languages, with the Constitution recognizing 22 in total. GDP: US$ 1,310,170,521,447 (2009) GDP per capita: US$ 1,134 (2009) Politics and society: After a long history of [...]
India as a global provider of IT services
In order to analyze experiences related to digital books in India, we must begin by reminding ourselves of the importance that information technology (IT) services have acquired within the country. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the IT sector represents no less than 6.4% of GDP and 26% of exports.[1] [...]
Publishing services companies
The championing of the software industry has made India a global centre for publishing-related technological services. There are countless companies of varying sizes offering services that include digitization, text recognition (OCR), conversion to ePub and layout. In one survey disseminated by Valuenotes in early 2010, 66% of publishers interviewed from the US and the UK [...]
Selling printed books through the Web
Many entrepreneurs from the IT world in India have dedicated themselves to e-commerce. Sachin and Binny Bansal, both computer science graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, opened the store FlipKart in 2007. Like Amazon – a company in which they had previously worked –, they began by selling physical books, but have now branched out [...]
Stores that sell electronic publications. The emergence of digital ecosystems
Let’s look now at some of the sites that have made inroads into the distribution of digital books and magazines. The virtual bookstore Odyssey360, for example, offers freely downloadable e-books in PDF through a link received by email. The texts are on subjects related to marketing, computing, health and self-help. In addition to almost 14,000 [...]
Public sector efforts: scientific repositories, virtual libraries and mass-market devices
If, as we have sought to show, Indian commercial platforms demonstrate remarkable dynamism, free-access websites are certainly not to be outdone. First of all, we find hundreds of institutional repositories built using free and open source software – in particular EPrints and DSpace. A considerable number of these portals host texts related to applied sciences and [...]
Cell phones
Despite the efforts of public and private bodies, neither fixed Internet connections nor e-readers, or tablets have mass penetration in India today. As occurs in sub-Saharan Africa, the only devices that are found on a wide scale are cell phones. In late 2010, India had around 752 million cell phone users, and to give an [...]
Indian publishers and experimentation with digital tools
It must be recognized that for Indian publishers, experimentation with new technologies is not an exotic option but rather an extremely valuable opportunity. On its portal, a long-established publishing house like Pustak Mahal proclaims itself to be “India’s largest publisher of mass appeal books” and at the same time “the first Indian publisher to be [...]
The digital age: challenges and proposals
Of course, not all Indian publishers show the same enthusiasm for new technologies. In fact a significant number of associated problems are mentioned repeatedly in the comments we have collected. Below we will give a brief description of these difficulties, as well as a number of proposals aimed at mitigating them. 1) To begin with, [...]
Possible trends
At any rate, digital publishing in India will be positively impacted by a series of powerful tendencies that will carve out a new landscape in the medium and long term: To begin with, we are already witnessing a social phenomenon that will leave a profound imprint: the emergence of a new middle class hungry for [...]