Maitrayee GhoshFulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral FellowFlorida State University , Tallahassee, FL

Background:At present e-books consumption in India is much slower than UK or US

but future of e-books is promising due to the fact that India is the world's

third largest English speaking country with a huge English language

book market. Bowker Market Research’s Global e-book Monitor reveals

that the market for e-books is set for a rapid increase in Brazil and India.

Over 50 percent of respondents from these two countries said that they

are likely to buy an e-book; Australia, India, the UK and the US

are leading the world in eBook adoption rates.

. India’s population is nearly 1.3 billion. It is being forecasted

that e-book adoption in India will rise due to high level of

mobile density in rural India, especially smartphones, phablets

and tablets, as primary access channel. Bowker’s Global e-

book Monitor conducted a online survey in 10 countries in

early 2012 showed that India is doing fairly well in terms of e-

book purchase, with significant number of respondents having

bought an e-book in the previous six months.

E-book readers in India:

India is known for its wide disparities, especially in language, the

initiative to develop regional language e-reader is the latest trend, for

example Samnsung Galaxy smartphone and tablets (Galaxy Grand,

Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Tab 3) support 9 Indian languages.

The mobile penetration in India is one of the highest in the world.

Indian e-book market, which had finally started to really ignite in

2013, is growing not due to e-reader sales but because people are

reading on their smartphones. The phablet is a combination of half-

phone & half-tablet (smartphones with screen sizes between 5-inch

and 6.99-inch) eliminating the need for two devices.Phablets emerge

as popular e-reader in India and its sale has been increasing

impressively.

E-book readers for Indian languagesName of the product Descriptions Price

AKASH (low cost tablet by

DATAWIND)

7 inch Capacitive touch screen, Android 4.0.3 ICS OS,1 GHz Cortex A8 processor. High quality Video Streaming & HD Quality Video Playback.

General price US$ 90US$ 20 (studentversion)

Epustak (e-book reader-

local made)

7" LED Screen & 300 grams; Educational content of the 1st to 10th

standard, supports English, and Marathi; 3 hours battery backup.

Developed under E-prashalaproject.

Wink (EC Media International – a Bangalore based co.)

Linux based operating system, supports 15 language. The Wink store offers a large number of e-books.

US$ 150

Wishtel IRA tablets for

native Indian languages

Google Android 2.2, include eBook reader app for Hindi and other languages , as well as course content for ICSE, CBSE and state boards.

US$ 90

Infibeam Pi e-book reader The device has an e-book store, a website for customers to purchase digital content, and a digital platform for publishers and content providers or

US$130

Infibeam Pi e-book reader- Infibeam is an e-

commerce company in India

launched Pi that looks like the

Amazon Kindle, with six inch

e-Ink screen and capability to

read word documents.

180 mm height, width

118 mm

E Ink Vizplex with

Resistive Touch & Epson

Display controller

File supported: PDF,

EPUB, HTML, TXT,

RTF, MOBI, PRC,

DOC

Page forward/backward

Jump to a specific page;

Progress bar to display

position in the book

Black & White 8/16

grayscale,Screen

Rotate for landscape /

portrait views

It supports 13 Indian

Languages.

Infibeam is collaborating with the National Council of Educational Research and Training to make textbooks in digital format.

E-book readers in India:

The Datawind’s creation Pocketsurfer 3G5 is

optimistic to bridge the digital divide in India; It is

developed by the same company that produced cheap

Aakash tablet. The Pocketsurfer 3G5 looks like a

smartphone but has a large screen 3G Android device

— a phablet, with an affordable price US$ 110

(INR 6,499)

Advocacy and initiatives to promote e-book culture

The regional and national literature festivals and the

aggressive promotional techniques adopted to enhance reading

culture and educate the people about e-books is a good sign

towards advocacy.

Many publishers see that smartphone as the main platform

for digital reading, especially e-readers such as the Kindle

failing to take off in a big way in India.

Broadband for villages- An ambitious Central Government

initiative to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to

2.5 lakh gram panchayats(village) across the country.

E-prashala is not only catering the needs of rural India but

the products are being appreciated and put to use in the

metros. http://www.indiamart.com/pc-clinic/eprashala.html10 lakhs= 1 million

The technology and expertise for digitisation in India has

improved tremendously, with a strong talent pool not only

digital-savvy but also has multimedia and animation skills.

Technology companies like Accenture, Tata Interactive,

Aptara, and hundreds of smaller players are involved in

digitising local content.

i-Musti Inc.is working with small publishers to digitize

Indian books, some of which went out of print ages ago in

regional languages.

Pothi.com enables authors and publishers to publish and

sell e-books through it's platform. They can upload their e-

books, set their price and sell it through Pothi.com's store.

The ebook retailer and manufacturer of e-reader devices

Kobo will launch in India “soon.” Kobo has been in

discussions with Indian publishers, including those haven’t

yet started to digitization.

Initiatives to promote e-book cultureThe e-Book portal for e-Books being subscribed by Biju Patnaikcentral library, NIT Rourkela was launched on May 2, 2014, whichincludes bibliographical detail of subscribed e-books with link tofull text.

INFLIBNET’s initiatives in e-books collection developmentThe higher education system in India is large and complex. India hasthe third largest higher education system in the world, behind Chinaand the United States comprising of more than 471 universities,22064 affiliated colleges(India, MHRD, 2009).Indian libraries intertiary level institutions are acquiring a large number of e-booksthrough consortia because academic e-books cost substantially morethan print editions. There are two major consortia : INDEST-AICTEfor technical institutions and UGC-INFONET for universities.

National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content(N-LIST)- Extending access to e-books to colleges. From Year 2014, NLIST Program is subsumed under UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium as college Component. The colleges in India are eligible to get access e-resources under NLIST Programme. As on Jun 24 2014, a total number of 3792 colleges have registered themselves with the N-LIST programme.

Barriers to e-book growth in India:

Although the Indian readers are aware of the advantages of

e-books, they continue to prefer and use printed

publications.

The reasons are:

lack of electronic content in Indian languages and

lack of proliferation of ICT tools in rural areas which

constitute a major chunk of the Indian population-

although technological advancements in e-books arena

(for example availability of regional language e-reader

etc.) are available but not as much, when compared to

large population use basic phone due to economically

backward status.

Concluding remarks:

The trend of reading e-books started in India two years back.

However in coming years there are good chances of boom this

industry and lot of promise in the Indian e-books market due

to digitization of content in regional languages and a huge

pool of upcoming writing talent. In India, Internet penetration

is still low, but mobile penetration is very high. So India is a

huge buyers’ and readers market in terms of handhelds and

digital content. Publishers don’t need to go far away to source

new books because both client and service providers are

available in abundance.

India is developing an ecosystem to make eBook publishing

and access easier and the eBook industry is bound to boom in

the coming years!