Reading Indian minds

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Where are India's readers? Amazon.in had an interesting answer to this when it conducted its Annual Reading Trends Report for 2015 - in the metros, as expected, but also in small towns and cities that haven't shown up before in reading surveys. The report said that readers in Surat, Bhubaneswar, Ernakulam, Vadodara and Visakhapatnam bought more books than readers in Indore, Raipur, Mysuru, Kanpur and Dehradun. Amish Tripathi's Immortals of Meluha and The Secret of the Nagas did blockbuster sales in translation from English into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi.

How are English language publishers connecting with this geographically- and linguistically diverse generation of readers? Business Standard asked Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, which publishes Tripathi and other writers who've done well in regional languages.

"I agree that publishers have not done enough research to understand their readers. It is very easy to get away by saying Indians don't read but how do you then explain the relatively recent phenomenon of Chetan and Amish crossing the million mark in unit sales?" Padmanabhan said. He felt that English language publishers needed to do more to understand the opportunities in the Indian languages, and could start by nurturing reading in schools and colleges.

Westland's experience with Amish's books was an eye-opener. "When we first considered bringing out a Hindi edition of the Immortals of Meluha, our first option was the licensing route." They weren't happy with the initial offers and decided to take a risk and publish their own translation. "Our initial print run was 10,000 copies, which we thought was fairly ambitious. As of today the combined sales of Tripathi's books is in excess of 500,000 copies in the Indian languages."

Westland now publishes translations of their bestselling Indian language books in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu and Bengali, but Mr Padmanabhan sees this trend, increasingly followed by multinational and homegrown publishers entering the language market "only as a good beginning". The future could be very interesting, if there's a growth in bookstores in tier-2 and -3 towns and if digital publishing initiatives manage to use the ubiquity of smartphones to reach books to new readers.

Hong Kong's banned books market: The industry for books banned in mainland China used to be a thriving one in Hong Kong, attracting publishers and booksellers like Morning Bell Press, Cosmos Books, Mighty Current and Causeway among others. That was before Lee Bo of Mighty Current Books and four of his associates disappeared last year in December, setting off shock waves through Hong Kong's thriving bookselling world.

In March, Lee Bo returned to Hong Kong, escorted by an unidentified man from the mainland, and announced that he was quitting the bookselling business: "I want to forget the past and start afresh. I am starting another page in my life." Then he left, saying that he intended to take his son to the mainland for medical treatment, and "felt proud as a Chinese".

The South China Morning Post reported that He Pin, the founder of New York-based Mirror Books, had drawn attention to plummeting sales after Lee Bo's disappearance, and predicted the end of the Hong Kong banned books industry. "Simply put, the Hong Kong [political] book industry has been collapsing mainly due to the Causeway Bay Books incident," he told the South China Morning Post.

Among the books that may no longer be available are works on the fate of Chinese democrats in the 1950s (The Past Is Not Like Smoke, Zhang Yihuo), and books that critique Mao or the present regime. Chinese dissident writer Yu Jie's new book on China's president, Xi Jinping's Nightmare, has also run into trouble. Readers in Hong Kong may want to get their copies of Yan Lianke's Serve The People! while they can.

It's famous for eliciting a blurb from the evaluation bureau of the Central Propaganda Bureau, which ordered a recall of all 30,000 copies of the Hua Cheng magazine in which it had been published. The CPB said: "It slanders Mao, the Army and is overflowing with sex."

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