The story of the books pages ought to be a tale of gloom: one books page per newspaper per week, typically, steady despite the massive growth in size and visibility of the books industry. (Business Standard is fortunately atypical, with books coverage six days a week.)
This would be sad, except that books have in the last few years spilled off the books page and onto the front page. And the opinion pages, and the people pages, the business pages, politics pages, local news, international news, consumer technology...
This year’s Jaipur Literature Festival gave an extra push to this colonisation by books news. It gave the English news-consuming population of India a chance to grapple again with ideas such as “freedom of speech”, “freedom of movement”, “religious minorities”, “elections”, “politicians”, “intelligence”, “Mumbai mafia”, “celebrities” and “soundbytes”. These are all front-page words and phrases, and here they were at a lit-fest.
It’s not just Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy who serve as templates for the discussion of “issues” such as free speech, bisexuality and revolutionary Maoism. When Iran’s president stole the national election and young Tehran moved onto the streets, Iranian novelists, and not just “analysts”, moved onto the comment pages. When sympathy turns to Palestine, there is a handful of Palestinian Arab writers to whom Western editors look for comment. What little fresh air there is in discussions of American politics wafts from insightful books by famous reporters or biographers. When something shifts in Nepal's state of paralysis, one of its few well-known authors is there to measure the change. When terrorists strike Mumbai, they set off a tidal wave of reportage, but it takes the follow-up books to help make sense of the event as a whole.
And that’s just geopolitics. Business books have exploded, too. Even news-led articles on topics like “management”, “branding”, “investing” and “outsourcing” may be thought to lack weight if composed without reference to the predominant books and writers/thought-leaders on those topics. Indian politicians are at last being written about, usually by journalists. State policy of every sort is discussed in seminars, books and essays. The bigger recent scams have triggered rows of useful books.
So, every page is potentially a books page, and every book can fit into some sort of news frame. The only kind of books coverage that hasn't grown in recent years is the kind that includes the traditional book review. The one books page of the typical paper cannot accommodate all the new books that the rising number of Indian and Indian-foreign publishers are putting out.
All the other pages seem to have picked up the slack. No book review happening for your book? Look for a slot on the people pages by inviting celebs to your launch. Or, get quoted in an article on a related subject. Or, seek a toehold in features by building yourself a “profile”. Or go where many people now get their news: Facebook.
Even so, I think a limit has been reached. The big global publishers in India have been quicker to exploit the opportunity to turn their books and authors into news. Now that there are so many smaller publishers on their way up, many run by savvy publishing people, and now that the Internet has eroded the size advantage for large publishers, there is likely to be much sharper competition for media visibility.
A raft of favourable reviews — of the traditional kind — is still essential for an author’s and publisher’s credibility. And books coverage offers an easy solution to the media's content hunger. So I believe there will soon be a renewed appetite for more books space of the traditional kind. Newsprint is expensive, but there is plenty of room on the website — and plenty of web traffic, if you are fortunate like the Business Standard. I'm looking forward to that.
