In print, you could call it a very long essay or a booklet - or a novella, if there was even the semblance of a story. These last, it seems, had become very popular in England in the late 19th century. They catered to the low tastes of the newly educated, a sort of olden day Mills and Boon sort of thing. In the digital format they are called e-Books.
The market for these in India was started by Juggernaut Books - I think. Juggernaut is an online portal for books that it sells for as little as Rs 10. The idea is to produce a single read of 30-45-60 minutes depending on your reading speed, or a bunch of them if you download a collection of short stories.
Also Read
Some of the older books, on which copyright has expired, are even free. These are the "classics" by writers of the 19th and early 20th century.
Since then, others too have entered the market. Mine was "published" by Westland, which has an arrangement with Amazon. It was priced at Rs 49. It sank like a stone.
Digital? No way, da
Many of my friends to whom I sent the link asked why the price was so low. I told them it was just a long essay and available only digitally.
When I heard their deep sighs - or its equivalent, no reply on email, messenger, WhatsApp - I knew these guys weren't going to read my masterpiece. The price was inviting, certainly, but the technology was inhibiting.
Unable to banish the vulgarities of economics from my mind - they have been there since I was 16 years old - I saw the choice as a trade-off between price and habit. I wondered if you could plot them on an XY axis graph.
It soon became very clear that there would be many potential readers who could not be converted into active ones. They absolutely refused to read on a screen even if the price was zero and even if they were stuck in traffic jams that lasted hours.
Which throws up a problem that monetary theorists are grappling with now because of zero interest rates: If even a zero price is not enough to induce a breaking of old habits, what is?
There is, then, the economics of it all: How many online copies do you need to sell to break even and make a small profit? The costs are no doubt low but if faced with the large and inflexible habit of reading only ink-on-paper, there is no way that any publisher can break even.
An average price of Rs 50 may soon become the norm because of the way Juggernaut has pioneered it. This means that in order to recover an investment of even Rs 1 lakh, 2,000 copies have to be sold.
Is the market large enough for this? What sort of marketing effort would be required? It is costly enough to sell that many even in the traditional format.
The alternative is to publish a very large number of e-Books and sell relatively small numbers of each. That seems to be the model now.
I suspect just about anyone who can write three sentences of English without dropping an article, and tell some sort of story, can publish. Indeed, they already are.
Market expansion
But the question once again rises: Is the Indian market large enough? How many people will spend Rs 50 a week in downloading a 50-75 page "book"? The real problem, therefore, is of market expansion.
This can only happen if e-Books are published in large quantities in all Indian languages. Sticking to English will simply not do.
This is relatively easy because there several thousands of short stories and novels in Indian languages. These only need to be translated, which means the demand for translators should already be up quite substantially.
In print versions, one might have had to worry about the quality of the translation but the online quick reader is likely to be less demanding. So what we are going to witness is an overall lowering of standards.
Which, economics-wise, is absolutely par for the course. When markets expand, quality declines.