Chiki Sarkar's 'Juggernaut' set to roll

Chiki Sarkar, the former publisher at Penguin Random House India, has launched a unique publishing venture to tap nearly 200 million smartphone users who will soon be able to read books on their mobile devices.
'Juggernaut', the new venture, will be powered by audacious strategies harnessing new technology, while still not abandoning the classic printed book, which will continue to be part of its portfolio.
It is for the first time that marquee names from corporate India including Infosys co-founder and the man behind the Aadhaar biometric identification project, Nandan Nilekani, Managing director of Fab India William Bissell, and Neeraj Aggarwal, MD of Boston Consulting Group, India, have invested in a publishing house.

Launched by Sarkar, Publisher and Founder, Juggernaut will have a CEO in Durga Raghunath, who has come from Network 18, where she founded Firstpost.Com and went on to become CEO of Web 18, thus indicating the digital thrust of the publishing start-up.
Sarkar's bet is three-pronged: traditional paper, e-books, and phone-reading. And her company will publish in any or all versions, depending on the specific strategy for each book, simultaneously in some cases, progressively in others.
"So the [traditional] book remains very central, especially for our literary and big name authors, and we are being distributed and warehoused by Hachette, a major publisher here with massive reach," she said.

But expect innovations like serialised novels, shorter chapters, appointment reading (what to read at midnight), genre fiction, and other experiments to draw in intensive phone-users who may not be reading anything in the form of a book at the moment.

Sarkar, who believes that "the book is under great threat in India", is hopeful that the new venture will change the way books are read in India.
"There's the paper book, the e-book, but along with that, there's life on the phone," said Sarkar. Initially publishing in English and Hindi, the new house hopes to branch out into a new Indian language every year.

"Much of traditional publishing is broken. Commissioning, marketing, sales. It's an opportunity to build from scratch," said Raghunath.
Juggernaut is betting on a large number of mobile Internet users for the success of the venture. While reading habits in Japan are an inspiration, Sarkar and Raghunath know this readership exists only in theory at the moment.