Happenings
On what’s been happening. If there’s news you have heard of and think it would make for interesting reading, please share it with us.

In the Loop in Frankfurt
Vinutha Mallya, Senior Editor, Mapin Publishing, visited the Frankfurt Book Fair again this year and wrote this report for The Publisher’s Post.

The good news for the Indian presence at the Fair this year was that the National Book Trust had taken a large stall, where they were also promoting the upcoming World Book Fair to be held in Delhi early next year. At the Sahitya Akademi stand, the spotlight was on Rabindranath Tagore, whose 150th birth anniversary is being commemorated by the nation this year. Other agencies at the Fair were CAPEXIL, and the Kolkata Book Fair. Matchmaking events and buy-seller meets were organised for publishers and printers, and provided good opportunity for gaining business leads. As each year, one hopes that next year the NBT will organize a collective stand for Indian publishers, which would ensure a stronger contingent from India at the Fair. (We needn’t wait to be made Guest of Honour!)

Read more »Publishing Conference – Publishing Next
India’s first conference on the future of Publishing – Publishing Next 2011 – was held on the 16th and 17th of September 2011. The conference attracted participants from all over India and even abroad and ensured that diverse perspectives were put forth during the two days of panel discussions, workshops and presentations.

The panel discussions were held on a variety of topics ranging from the future of independent publishing to marketing in the age of social media to the future of publishing houses themselves. Workshops on the art of academic writing and social media for publishers were also held in an environment that encouraged participation from the audience. In a departure from the usual format of conferences such as these, various technologies were presented by different entrepreneurs, those that represented the future of publishing.

Over the two days participants had an opportunity to network with each other. Given the diverse backgrounds of those attending, participants found that there was a lot they could borrow from each other and collaborate with in order to boost their own businesses.

Publishing Next is now planned as an annual feature with meetups planned between the annual conference.

For reports and blogs about the conference do visit www.publishing-next.com/2011/

FICCI organizes PubliCon 2011

The sessions chaired by eminent persons in their own fields touched upon various aspects of publishing. The first session on day 1 discussed the proposed National Book Promotion Policy and stressed the need for its careful implementation and monitoring. Another panel discussed how India could be a hub for e-book development while a third discussed the huge market potential of comic books and childrens’ books. The first day concluded with a discussion on how IPR could be managed in the publishing industry with perspectives from markets other than the Indian market.

The second day opened with a panel discussion on the role of book fairs in the country. This was followed by one that discussed the export potential of the Indian Publishing Industy. The conference concluded with discussions on how libraries could be rejuvenated in India.

Besides allowing a platform for important topics to be discussed, the conference also allowed members of the publishing industry to meet and network with each other.

Jumpstart 2011
In its 3rd year now, JUMPSTART witnessed an unprecedented euphoria. The two days saw 32 speakers from 5 countries and from almost all parts of India. And over 250 participants, many of whom have been attending since the last 2 years, and many people travelling to Delhi from different parts of India.

Over the two days, various topics were discussed. In the inaugural session on day 1, a number of ideas about how, in the digital age, the idea of the book has been “shattered” and “splintered” were floated, challenging the audience – of publishers and creative people – to rethink the parameters of what they do. Similarly, in later sessions, the audience was educated on the marketing challenges faced by publishers, the state of children’s books in India, the challenges of retail and interesting models people are coming up with to battle infrastructure issues. The second day mainly saw various instances of how storytelling had evolved, especially within the Indian context. Devdutt Pattanaik, for instance, spoke of narrative lineage and his personal explorations in re-telling ancient myths for a young audience.

Various workshops were also organized, aimed at individual groups of writers, illustrators and librarians. The second day also saw the first LitCam conference in India. With a focus on literacy and publishing and literacy in media, the sessions had some very pertinent and exciting discussions on issues that concern us all in the publishing industry.

First Volume of Konkani Encyclopedia Released
Source: daijiworld.com
Konkani Language and Cultural Foundation celebrated the Konkani Manyatha Divas (recognition of Konkani by its inclusion in the 8th schedule of the constitution) by releasing the first volume of the three-part Encyclopedia of Konkani at a function held at World Konkani Centre, Shaktinagar on August 20.

Prof Rajesh Sachdeva Director-in-Charge of Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, who released the book in the presence of Dr Tanaji Harlankar, guest of honour and Chief Editor of the Encyclopedia of Konkani emphasized on the importance of contribution of the community in safeguarding and developing their language. Read more »

National Book Printers conference (NBPC) in Thiruvananthapuram next month
Source: Print Week India
India’s first National Book Printers conference (NBPC) will be hosted between 17 to 19 November at Thiruvanthapuram in Kerala.

Top book printer-exporters from India will participate in a panel discussion on day one. Manipal Technologies, Lovely Offset, IPP, Gopsons, Replika Press, Repro India, Thomsons Press and MultiVista Global have confirmed their presence at NBPC 2011 along with other book printers, book publishers and government delegates.

The three-day event is being supported by Welbound and Henkel CAC India. It will consist of knowledge seminars and panel discussions which have been conceptualised by PrintWeek India. Professor Werner Rebsamen will be the keynote speaker on day one of the event.

“Key post-press suppliers will be providing innovative technological solutions during the conference with an objective to make India the largest book print exporter by 2017,” said P Sajith, Welbound Worldwide. Read more »

Indian flavour rules at Comic Con
Source: booktrade.info
The second edition in the country and the first of its kind in Mumbai, the event saw characters like Darth Vader with his red saber rubbing shoulders with the world’s favourite pirate, Captain Jack Sparrow. Around 40 stalls exhibited works by Indian and international comic as well as graphic novel publishers.

With 5,000 odd people visiting on day one, stalls with the maximum sales at the event were not the graphic novels, but those selling comic merchandise. “It’s difficult to get your hands on to a lot of this stuff. I’m a huge Family Guy fan, so when I saw these broaches, I just knew I had to stock up,” says Abeer Aggarwal, an advertising professional.

And though bookstores like Landmark, Crossword and Flipkart too have set shops here, it was the small, independent artists who got maximum eyeballs. Bollywood too took a backseat, as Bihari superhero Uud Bilaw Manus took on Ra.One the comic. Read more »

Business of selling books set for a wrenching change
Source: Economic Times
The Indian author, especially the one who writes in English, no longer lives on fresh air and inspiration. As interest in Indian writing and book sales have gone up, so have the advances.

Having said that, not everyone is giggling all the way to the bank. Despite being the world’s third-largest producer of English titles by volumes after the US and the UK, Indian booksellers are bleeding, a result of what Hachette India managing director Thomas Abraham terms “overexpansion”.

The leading book retail chains are still in an expansion mode in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore to consolidate their positions. “But there isn’t as much a demand for books in the metros that justifies the presence of as many players,” says Abraham. The result? Booksellers end up cannibalising each other. Read more »

Lacklustre response to Delhi Book Fair disappoints exhibitors
Source: The Hindu
Though bibliophiles could be seen in good numbers on the penultimate day of the ongoing Delhi Book Fair at Pragati Maidan here on Saturday, its director, Shakti Malik, is a disillusioned man because of bleak response from the book reading public.

According to Mr. Malik, one of the main reasons is lack of publicity for this annual event. “There should have been more publicity in local newspapers and satellite channels so that Delhiities living in far flung areas could have made it to the fair. This is a book fair that has been conceptualised for the citizens of Delhi but if they are missing it then it is disheartening for me and other publishers,” said the veteran book promoter, who has played a significant role over the past 16 years in popularising books authored by Indian writers at this fair. Serious buyers did come to the nine-day-long fair but only in dribs and drabs. However, there was a silver lining in the Chinese publishers evincing interest in books authored by Indian writers and there being an agreement on translation rights.

Read more »‘Identity of Indian in writing is problematic’
Source: http://expressbuzz.com/
“Why do Indian writers write in English? This was asked to me by the organiser of a poetry fest in Poland. The identity of the Indian in Indian writing thus becomes a problematic one,” said author Anita Nair. She was inaugurating the Indian Ruminations Literary Festival at the Vyloppilli Samskrithi Bhavan on Saturday. The Indian-born writer added that writings in Indian English after the 1960s were rarely discussed in academic circles.

The literary festival is hosted by Indian Ruminations, a web-based writers’ collective and publishing firm. Books authored by city-residents Anu Joshy and Anna Maria were released at the event. An anthology of poems by writers from various parts of the country was also released under the banner of Roots & Wings, the publication wing of the website.

Delivering the presidential address, Additional Chief Secretary K Jayakumar said that translations were as serious a literary engagement as creative writing. “Empanelling of translators is a rigorous process in most International Book Festivals and only the translations done by the members of that panel are accepted for the festivals. Translation is a serious work and translators should be respected and well-paid,” he said. “When great literary works are translated into vernaculars, it is not the literary space of M T Vasudevan Nair or Basheer that is compromised, but that of the new writers who will have to struggle to get noticed by readers and critics. This is where initiatives such as Indian Ruminations can play the role of effective mediators between readers and writers,” he said.

Awards for works of poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction) in both English and Malayalam were presented to authors by Tamil poet K Pankajam. Technical writer Nayanathara received the award for best poetry in English for her The Scent of Frangipani while in the Malayalam section, the award was given to Rajesh Chithira for his Unmathathakalude Crash Landingukal. Amit Upadhyay of Delhi has bagged the award for the best fiction in English for his work
Evil is Evil Good is God. Journalist Sulfikkar Kamar shared the award for best non-fiction work in Malayalam (’Fernhill’) with Ajoy Kumar MS (’Angane Oru Mambazhakalam’). Read more »

Indian writers turning bolder!
Source: daily.bhaskar.com
“There has been a greater acceptance of such writing by society, possibly on account of a more matured audience and the desire of the reader to experiment with varied styles, genres of writing”

Going by what India is reading and writing of late, the country seems to be undergoing a mass change in its attitude to morality. Latest books, including controversial translations from yester-years, have proved that the common man is more understanding of what goes on in a marriage and is perhaps more tolerant of transgressions.

Take Farrukh Dhondy’s “Adultery and Other Stories” (HarperCollins), the newest entrant in literature to explore relationships in an out-of-marriage context. These stories about ‘love, lust, friendship, betrayal and the ways of the heart’ take on the seventh commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Of course, the word ‘adultery’ is gaining new nuances and carries all kinds of meanings in modern-day vocabulary.

In Shinie Antony’s recently released novel “When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied” (Rupa), the erring partners are delightfully caricatured. Far from being the stereotypical mistress, Mira is your average, neighbourhood psycho whose heart is in the right place.

Agreed, adultery is as old as the hills, but interpretations are new and now manifold. In most of these books, affairs rarely culminate in marriage – the ultimate traditional destination of man-woman relationships. Indeed the new trend is to tell it like it is and not judge.

Read more »Future of Books rather good
Source: Print Week
There’s been a bit of action on the book front.

…publishers across the country are now targeting the YA segment as a separate category and coming up with books that have adolescent Indian protagonists in local settings. HarperCollins Publishers India launched the YA category last year under the Harper imprint while Penguin India rolled out Penguin YA in February 2011. Amar Chitra Katha also plans to come out with two separate YA lists – graphic novels as well as fiction – within six months. All of them are targeting the 14 to 21 age group as a separate segment.

Read more »It is the best of times for new authors
Source: The Hindu

But even in these good times, finding a publisher can be quite a task. R. Chandrasekhar’s The Goat, the Sofa and Mr. Swami was turned down by three publishers before Hachette, impressed by the first three chapters, published him. “My story revolved around cricket, bureaucracy and politics, all three are timely and continue to be,” says the alumnus of Vivekananda College, Delhi School of Economics and University of Chicago.

Publishers employ many methods to process this deluge. For instance, Chennai-based Blaft Publications are open to getting works from first-time writers but insist on an element of surprise in the story and “not somebody who wants to be another Chetan Bhagat or an IIM story,” says a spokesperson. Rupa & Co too rejects a considerable percentage of the manuscripts they receive.

Read more »Language and Identity
Source: The Hindu
With an inherited legacy of access to multiple languages, our writers and translators are enriching the English language with a typically Indian tenor and landscapes…

The more thorough the last of these acts, the deeper the self-forgetfulness of the defeated because language is like life, like faith, in it is encoded the identity of a people. But unlike the Portuguese who tortured the local people in and around Goa, pushed Latin into churches at the point of a sword and banned Marathi and Konkani, the British did not force their language on us … they simply made it socially expedient and professionally profitable to learn English even as they withdrew funding for scholars of Arabic and Sanskrit. After English was institutionalised in India and after a few decades of self-denigration and excessive awe of Western textbook-English, not only did Indians start to experiment with English, and reverse creative norms by beginning to translate into this visitor language, which they picked up rapidly, but they also coined usages with which no one can argue: popular ones, not literary. Not to mention, “I am thinking it is going to rain…” which overtook “I think it’s going to rain…” and which, according to David Crystal will one day be accepted as Standard English.

Read more »

New Book Releases and Events
New book and journal releases, new imprints and other similar events.

Indian language literature goes to Frankfurt Book Fair
Source: http://ibnlive.in.com
In a first showcase of Indian indigenous writing, a literary panorama featuring works by over 30 language writers was on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in a pilot exhibition for readers and publishers from Europe, the US and other countries.

The literary panorama was initiated by the union culture ministry under the ‘ILA: Indian Literature Abroad’ project. The project aims to carry the diversity of contemporary regional Indian literature from the grassroots to the world through source translation, which involves creation of original work directly to foreign languages in an attempt to remove dependence on English translation. Initially, the focus of translation is on six UNESCO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Read more »

Simon and Schuster eyes India’s digital reading space
Source: newKerala.com
The booming publishing market in India has lured yet another international publishing firm, Simon and Schuster, which is high on the country’s growing digital reading space. Simon and Schuster, the publishing segment of CBS Corp, has opened an India-specific unit.

The publishing house wants to cash in on digital transformation, the demand for inexpensive books and the inherent financial advantages like lesser material and allied costs in India, said Carolyn K. Reidy, president and CEO of Simon and Schuster. Read more »

Nobody’s in the library
Source: Economic Times
The rise of online library to suit changed lifestyles

Once upon a time, before the rise of the Internet and the emergence of hundreds of television channels, the library was where people went for both information and entertainment. It was here they learnt about global events, or were transported to distant lands. But then the library became a victim of rapidly changing lifestyles, and was on the verge of being wiped out. That is until it rediscovered itself in a new avatar: the online library.

Putting library catalogues online is now a growing trend, with several start-ups offering the service, and some traditional libraries following suit. In February 2010, the British Council Library, or BCL, at Mumbai’s Nariman Point, arguably the best-known library in the city, opted to close down and focus entirely on its online service. With online libraries sprouting all over India, are traditional libraries becoming obsolete?

Yes, says Hiten Turakhia, one of the founders of the Mumbai-based librarywala.com, the country’s first online library service. “Due to busy schedules, fewer people are willing to spend their precious free time travelling to a library,” he says. “This is where online libraries come in, where the books are delivered at your doorstep.”

Read more »Lit fests bloom as interest grows among sponsors
Source: livemint.com

The next four months will see at least 10 major literary festivals across the country, including the Indian edition of the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts (Kerala), the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival (Delhi), the Kovalam Literary Festival (Kerala), the Goa Arts and Literary Festival, and Literature Live! (Mumbai).

Organizing such an event costs between Rs. 50 lakh and Rs. 5 crore, according to organizers. The cost increases 15-20% annually, said Sanjoy K. Roy, founder of Teamwork Productions Pvt. Ltd, which has been organizing cultural festivals for nearly two decades. Besides infrastructure, costs that rise continuously are travel, accommodation and security, he added.

Read more »A barrier-free world with open-access publishing
Source: The Hindu

The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), based on the Technopark campus in Thiruvananthapuram, is poised to take its first step into open-access publishing. The centre is set to release the Journal of Free Software and Free Knowledge on Monday, representing the next stage in the free software movement.

Talking to The Hindu, Satish Babu, director, ICFOSS, said open-access publication provided an answer to the problems posed by copyright restrictions in the conventional method of publishing. A recent development in the domain of scholarly publishing, open-access publication aims at providing free, instant, global, and indexed access to published literature, without compromising on its quality. It encourages widespread access, use and reuse, with or without modification, of the original work, while maintaining the integrity of the original material and the rights of its author. Open-access publication is enabled by the Internet and Web technologies.

Read more »Bringing art back into fairy tales
Source: DNA
There was a time when story books laden with beautiful illustrations made heading to bed in the night, an event to look forward to. Fairy tales came alive with the equally-enticing illustrations. With PSPs, the computer and television grabbing the eyeballs, will picture books be a thing of the past?

Karadi Tales, the pioneers in audio-books in India don’t think so. Stepping out from the audio-book mode, the company recently launched five picture books under the Chitra imprint; namely, Whose lovely child can you be?, When the Earth Lost Its Shape, The Moustache Man, The Dancing Man and Dorje’s Stripes.

Shobha Vishwanath, writer and publishing director of Karadi Tales explains, “We are in a transitional phase right now. We have moved from cassettes to CDs and are deliberating on what to do next. This is a reason why we have decided to move to picture books.”Read more »

Indian student creates publishing buzz in London
Source: Times of India
Prajwal Parajuly, a 27-year-old student at the University of Oxford from Gangtok, Sikkim, India, created quite a furore in the publishing world of London this week by being signed by the Steig Larson trilogy publisher Quercus Books in a respectable five-figure pound advance. With the signing, Mr. Parajuly becomes the youngest author at Quercus.

Already touted as the next big thing in South Asian fiction by various publications of the Indian sub-continent, Prajwal’s The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories clinched him the deal in a two-book signing, proving that talent – irrespective of the market for short-story collections – doesn’t go unrecognized. This will be the first time a book on fiction has been written about Nepali-speaking people without the contents restricting themselves to Nepal.Read more »

Elsewhere…
News from around the world…

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to…Tomas Transtromer
Source: nytimes.com

Critics have praised Mr. Transtromer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation, noting his elegant descriptions of long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature.

“So much poetry, not only in this country but everywhere, is small and personal and it doesn’t look outward, it looks inward,” said Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, the imprint of HarperCollins that has published English translations of Mr. Transtromer’s work. “But there are some poets who write true international poetry. It’s the sensibility that runs through his poems that is so seductive. He is such a curious and open and intelligent writer.”

Read more »