I'm still in touch with my manager from the US, and it made me smile to receive this article about a Columbian teacher traveling the countryside by donkey to bring books to village children. Biblio-burro!
Yet, her email referenced ebooks. It made me stop and ask: What's the connection?
She replied, these days the big conversation is about ebooks. Apple released their iPad, and Penguin immediately produced a platform for it. As textbook publishers, we're exploring new ways to deliver content online. As a result, it's funny to realize that so much of the world's population has no access to books of any kind.
Though I've been keeping up with the evolution of the Kindle-Nook-iPad-publisher melee, I've been surprised how little I've thought about ebooks since arriving in India. My initial assumption is that there would be a huge market for them here, since the IT sector is so dominant and the population so literate. That doesn't seem to be the case, however. Instead, their print industry seems to be doing fine.
Take, for instance, their newspaper industry. The American newspaper is dying a slow, gurgling death, where the Indian newspaper industry is flourishing. India has 62,000 newspapers circulating in the country, and more are opening every day. They don't compete with online newspapers to the same extent, given that high-speed internet is less an attractive commodity in India than, say, mobile phones. Companies probably benefit more from placing an ad over a telecom network than on a website (and they know this, which is I why I get at least five SMS ads per day). With fewer market offerings for online reading, to get their news fix Indians turn to paper.
If only our publishing industry had such a readership! Maybe it could have saved the Detroit Free Press!
Who knows if there will be a tipping point, though. We're starting to see more schools become interested in online learning, which means the Internet game may be opening up. I think it says a lot about a culture, though, that even without fancy iPads and gadgets, reading is so popular. I hope those children in Columbia grow up to say the same.
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