SAGE Publications to launch Gujarati titles

After catering to premier B-schools like the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), academic and reference publisher, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. is planning to launch Gujarati titles soon.

The publishing company is exploring the Gujarati publishing market to tie-up with regional language publishers for co-publishing titles.

"We are looking to partner with publishers for co-publishing Gujarati titles and have begun exploring regional publishing houses. Languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, and Telugu are the thrust areas for us to venture into the regional language publishing. So far we have already rolled out titles in Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi," said Vivek Mehra, managing director and chief executive officer of SAGE India.

 

Largely into academic publishing, SAGE is also into non-fiction works for retail.

According to Mehra, amidst the current meltdown, the retail market for books has been affected. "While footfalls in overall retail has fallen by 50 per cent, books may have gone down by 20-30 per cent," he said. However, Mehra added that retail forms less than 10 per cent of its publishing work.

Apart from academic and reference books for B-schools and colleges, the company recently also ventured into textbooks for undergraduate and post graduate programs.

"Modelling them with the NCERT, we have launched textbooks for undergraduate and post graduate programs in colleges and business schools," said Mehra.

Employing around 170 people, SAGE Publications pegged a turnover of Rs 25 crore for the financial year 2007-08.

The company is expecting a steady growth of 20 per cent for the current fiscal.