Think ahead of the curve

BOOKS: Piracy in India is in boom, but publishers are confident of holding their own.

There is both good and bad news for the English fiction market in India. The good news is that readership has leapt at least 15 per cent in the last two years. The bad news "" so has piracy.

"Piracy is expected to eat around 20 per cent of the English fiction segment," says PM Sukumar, CEO, HarperCollins India, "which is huge, considering that the market is now estimated at Rs 1,000 crore in the country."

Piracy has become a thorn in the flesh of almost every publisher in the world today, but the worst affected are the publishers of bestsellers that are often sold on the roads at a pittance.

The horror of seeing such tacky reproductions apart, piracy ruins the publisher's sales estimates "" which ends up hurting the author's reputation as a saleable writer.

Effectively, this also means that the cream of publishers, mostly international names with sizeable investment plans, are no longer competing with each other (at least not in the traditional sense). Their common scourge is the pavement seller doing brisk sales.

"Intellectual property laws have never really been effective in curbing piracy of any kind, let alone novels. There is room for making stricter laws, but whether they will be implemented is a totally different matter," says Sukumar.

Adding to the publishers' woes is the simplicity of the entire operation. All it takes is a copy of a novel, a ramshackle printing press in some tin-shed, and a cobbled-together network of street distributors.

Better books retailing, however, can play the rescue act. The reasoning: people would pay the proper price for a book if it were easily available. Already, the sudden growth of bookstore chains in the big cities is being credited for the 15 per cent growth that the official market expects this year.

HarperCollins recorded a growth of 20 per cent last year, and is looking forward to 10 per cent this year. This has been possible on the back of successes like Paulo Coelho's The Zahir and Tarun Tejpal's Alchemy of Desire.

India Ink, which scored this year with Kalpana Swaminathan's Page Three Murders and CP Surendran's An Iron Harvest, is optimistic that the latest from its stable, Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir by Jaspreet Singh, would be able to withstand pressure from pirated versions. A good way to beat pirates is to get business going before they wake up to it.

Agrees Orient Longman, which does not see any reason to overreact to piracy. "Although English fiction is a major segment in India," says Tanmoy Roy Chowdhury, head of marketing, "the reading tastes of Indian readers at present are no longer just restricted to one or two particular genres."

Catering to diverse interests is another way to counter piracy, which tends to concentrate on only a few surefire sellers. Here, internet sales might help (see review of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail on the Opinion page), since this medium can afford to sell a wider variety of books.