Harper-Collins India has come out with a new toddlers’ series aimed at developing reading skills for children aged between one and five years. The “Big Cat Read at Home” series, published in June, is divided into four levels.

While level one – called “First Steps” – strings a few simple words and pictures together for children as young as one, level two, “Discover Reading”, teaches two-to-three-year olds to read short sentences with colourful visuals.

Level three, “Explore Reading”, links stories with speech and developed characters. Level Four, “Love Reading”, stretches the stories a little more so that they can be read independently.

“Children are not reading these days and parents are working. They do not have the time or the energy to read books to their children. The USP of the toddlers’ series is that one can go beyond the book. At the end of each book, there are notes for parents on how to use the series for various activities for kids,” Lipika Bhushan, marketing manager of Harper Collins-India, told IANS.

“The books have been prompted by the ‘Mom and I’ and ‘Dad and I’ workshops we have conducted to promote reading habits among children and help parents and their children bond better,” Bhushan said.

The marketing manager of Harper Collins said 2008-2009 has seen a spurt in the sale of children’s books with business growing by 10-12 percent despite the downturn.

The price of the books ranges between Rs.75 and Rs.495.

A snapshot of the Indian publishing industry

The popularity of Indian writing in English has been affirmed by various studies including one by Tapan Basu (Contemporary Indian Writing in English: Is there a market in India for this text?). The National Readership survey 2005 revealed that the time that people in India spend on reading has gone up significantly — from 30 minutes per day to an average of 39 minutes per day over the previous three years. The increase was sharper in urban India (from 32 to 42 minutes per day). This increased reading habit augurs well for the future of the book market.

Though the proportion of Indians who speak and read English-language books is very small, given India’s billion-plus population, this stills adds up to pretty substantial numbers in terms of the potential readers that can be targeted by publishers. A potential market of 65 million persons is second only to the 215-million English-language speaking population in the US, and more than the 60 million of the UK and 20 million of Australia. Which is why Penguin’s David Davidar says India is the fastest-growing English-language market in the world today. In the coming decade, India’s book market could be bigger than that in Canada.

While English-language publishing is more active in India, the number of titles published in Indian languages is equally impressive. The Federation of Indian Publishers’(FIP) estimated that 82,537 titles were published in India in 2004. Besides, other books published in India, in various Indian languages on subjects like folk literature and religion (which do not have ISBN numbers) may be around another 25,000 of so. Of the books that have ISBN numbers, the largest number of titles were in Hindi (21,370, or 25.9 per cent of the total), followed by English at 18,752 (22.7 per cent), Tamil at 7,525 (9.1 per cent),5,538 in Bangla(6.7 per cent), 5,475 in Marathi (6.6 per cent), 3,482 in Telugu (4.2 per cent), 3,358 in Malayalam (4.1 per cent), 3,213 in Gujarati (3.9 per cent), 2,172 in Urdu (2.6 per cent), 1,998 in Kannada (2.4 per cent),1,298 in Punjabi (1.6 per cent), 1,285 in Assamese (1.6 per cent), 763 in Oriya (0.9 per cent), 749 in Sanskrit (0.9 per cent), 176 in Sindhi (0.2 per cent) and 140 in Kashmiri (0.2 per cent) — other languages added up to another 5,243 (6.4 per cent). Only two languages — Hindi and English — went into double-digits.