A Small Story

The oracle has spoken. The reader of English books in India is a rich, lonely, serious, young man. The images evoked by this sentence could make it the opening line of any of the romance novels that women, a small percentage of the readers of English language books in India, like to read. Let us also pause for a moment in memory of the trees that were felled, to make the paper that ended up as the pages of the issue that circulated the findings Tehelka Readership Survey 2010. A set of 15-16 questions asked of a little over one thousand one hundred people outside bookshops in nine cities in India would but necessarily lead to formulations that even in casual conversations would be dismissed as a trite. Especially as we live in a context that does not lend itself well to sweeping statements, as Joan Robinson had said "whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."

The world of books and ideas in India is a strange mix of contradictory currents and impulses. We have a large publishing industry active across 37 languages, bringing out more than one hundred thousand books of which only a third are in English. The survey deals only with reading in English and this exclusive focus itself distorts the findings. True even the thought of a readership survey across all languages is daunting—there are entire worlds of publishing in Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Gujarati—to completely ignore these worlds renders any attempt to understand readers meaningless.

Apart from some notable exceptions, the book industry is run by people with little understanding of books and reading. My favourite anecdote is of a conversation I had with a manager of a leading distribution house. I had gone to his office in the early morning to pick up my stock of the latest Harry Potter book for myself and to distribute to friends and family. He spoke of his foresight in managing to corner a large quantity of the limited stock available anticipating that the actual bookshop demand on the day of release would outstrip the advance orders he had received. He then very seriously wanted to understand the Harry Potter phenomena, he asked me why children read the book; did it make them intelligent? The readership survey ignores the boom witnessed in children's books. One of their questions (Do you read porn?) clearly indicates that they do not think children can be readers. Children's reading was indeed powered by J K Rowling creating a fantasy world that allowed all of us readers of her books to escape into, and return as stupid as ever.

The book business for many years conducted itself in a kind of "amiable confusion" with editors and authors bringing out books that emerged from conversations on ideas and concepts, which they then "sold" to marketing. The stakes were low; willy-nilly some good books got published and sold, albeit in low numbers.  Prestige and money were to be got when a book was published in the UK and the US. The joke going about was that Shobha De's books were helping editors at Penguin India publish a larger variety of Indian authors whose books really did not bring in the money.

The small scale of operations however also allowed book distributors to offer all publishers the service of dispatching books to bookshops and then gauging what was selling and what was not, by playing this low-risk game of chance. The standard operating procedure was to send a few copies of a new book to leading bookshops in the city, and based on the sale there to then send copies "up country" i.e. to bookshops outside the city. The size of the initial order depended on the stature of the author and very often on the number of people attending the launch party. The only expense incurred by the distributor was the cost of transporting the books to and from the select list of bookshops, as new books were distributed on a sale or return basis. Very little else in terms of logistical support was provided by the distributor—no tracking of actual bookshop sales and stock levels, no inventory management, and very rudimentary accounting practices. A lot depended on the trader-instinct of the staff in-charge. Thus distribution in India provided a channel which could move books that moved on their own and sold books that sold on their own. Books that came up for a fast re-order were recognized as fast movers and books that were returned without a re-order were marked as non-sellers.

This level of distribution served, albeit inadequately, a network of bookshops that were largely proprietary concerns. Here the owner, a trusted staff or both, managed stock acquisition, handled the sales counter and fielded book enquiries from customers. As a function of the individual owner and the readership it served each bookshop developed its own profile of the books it stocked and sold. It was the network of proprietary bookshops that gave the book distribution networks a flexibility to supply a heterogeneous mix of books, acquired from a varied numbers of sources, including small publishers.

Many moons have passed; the book industry in India has changed. The first most obvious sign of the change is growth in sales. At a time when industry level sales figures in the UK and the US have flattened at a low single digit growth rate, India has seen growth figures ranging from 15 to 30% bandied about. In India books have remained largely unaffected by recession. In the publishing of general books – fiction and non-fiction, much attention has been drawn by the high sales achieved by a whole host of bestselling titles. This has been attributed to a expansion of the "reading segment" caused by the coming of age of a young generation; the entry of more professional publishing operations in the shape of Indian arms of global publishing conglomerates; and the setting up of bookshop chains in India. We have now have a whole host of bestselling authors who sell well both in international markets and in India.  So what is there to complain about?
The coming of bookshop chains in India has without doubt opened up vast amounts of shelf space; however whether all books are gaining access to that space is up for question. In the chains inventory management and book purchasing functions have moved up from the bookshop level to the central office, with purchase officers immediately answerable to corporate leadership, especially finance and accounts. Here the concerns naturally revolve around margins and the speed with which stock is converted into sales.

The high level of investments made by the new international publishing ventures entering India also calls for high returns on investment. These returns are relatively easy to get from BPO operations and in the realm of educational, scientific and technical books. In books meant for general readers, the challenge is much harder, and the impact of these concerns is more insidious. A significant amount of the concerns of book acquisition editors is spent in chasing projects that would be bring in the high numbers. It is when the focus shifts from what authors are writing to what readers purportedly want to read that the book changes its identity and becomes a product – a fast moving consumer good. The concerns of the publishing industry then move into the regular concerns of a distribution-driven market, ensuring visibility both in media and the stores. And might eventually move onward down this path to ensuring an exclusive space to the most invested in product.    

With the growth of the publishing industry in India, there are also signs of a corporatization of publishing operations which is shutting out smaller voices or books that never aspired to sell huge numbers. The attention of all concerned — chain book stores, distributors, publishing bosses, book review editors, are the books that make the most noise – bigger advances, more glitzy launches attended by bigger celebrities and leading to spectacular sales. Ursula K Le Guin, an incredibly sensitive author writing both science fiction and fantasy spoke thus about the problems of this kind of publishing in the Harpers Weekly (2008) "until the corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly. How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?"

The period that witnessed the increasing presence of big international publishing companies in India, has also seen the emergence of many new independent publishing ventures and the continued, vocal presence of older ones. Their experiences go beyond the standard retelling of the story of "big corporate bullies" and "victim stories" of independents being pushed out of the publishing playground. But these are small stories, and will not make a spectacle, a sensation or a tehelka.

Joseph Mathai is based in Delhi as an independent researcher with diverse interests and many years of involvement in environment, civil rights, pedagogy and politics. Professionally he has been in publishing for more than sixteen years.

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