Rubbishing those who hail the digital age as the end for books, book publishers industry players and best-selling authors on Saturday hailed a new dawn for publishing, with India’s voracious readers at its forefront.
Book sales have been squeezed in recent years by e-books and the huge success of Amazon.Com’s Kindle reader, but India’s booming book publishers market is proof of the physical book’s staying power, said participants at Asia’s largest literary event, the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.
“You read something on Twitter and you know it is ephemeral,” said Patrick French, a best-selling historian and biographer who has written extensively on Asia. “Yet the book is a solid thing. The book endures.”
Regional language novelists and poets rubbed shoulders with Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners at the seventh festival to be held in the historical pink-tinged city of Jaipur, the capital of India’s northwestern Rajasthan state.
Hundreds of book lovers attended a debate on the fate of printed books in the sun-drenched grounds of a former palace as part of the free five-day event.
“The idea of the book dying comes up all the time. It’s wrong. I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” said John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of the Penguin Group of publishers.
“Books matter more in India than anywhere else we publish them,” added Makinson, whose Penguin Group is one of the world’s largest English-language book publishers.
While book sales slip in most western countries, the non-academic book market in India is currently growing at a rate of 15 to 18 percent annually, as rapid economic growth swells literacy rates and adds millions to the middle class every year.
At the festival, schoolchildren from around the country chased their authorly heroes through the lunch queues to get autographs on newly-purchased books.
Makinson noted that the pressure on physical bookshops in countries like the United States — where bookseller Borders Group Inc is in talks to secure a $500 million credit line — doesn’t exist in India, adding that books have a key role to play in Indian society.
“In India books define and create the social conversation amongst christian book publishers and children’s book publishers. In China, the books that sell well are self-improvement titles. Popular books in India are of explanations, explaining the world. The inquisitive nature of India is unique.”
Indian critic Sunil Sethi, who presents India’s most popular television program on books, said the digital age presented an opportunity, rather than a threat, for printed matter. “Even before I finish my show, the authors are on Twitter to say they are on TV talking about their book. Technology is merging things, but the book is still at the center,” Sethi said.
French agreed that technology, if well-managed, could actually help win books new friends and wider sales.
“Digital e-books have created a space for discussion. Books now have websites and forums, and so reading books on electronic devices has created communities and interaction,” he said.
Nearly 50,000 writers, critics, publishers and fans are expected to attend the festival.
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A 76-year-old British writer has been jailed for six weeks in Singapore after the High Court found him guilty of contempt of court over a book that raised questions about the independence of the judicial system.
Alan Shadrake, who lives in Malaysia, had refused to apologise for the content of his book, Once a Jolly Hangman, which deals with the use of the death penalty in the island state.
Mr Shadrake had offered to apologise for offending the judiciary before being convicted two weeks ago, but Justice Quentin Loh ruled that his book had scandalised the court.
He said Mr Shadrake had shown “a reckless disregard for the truth” and “a complete lack of remorse”. The defendant had contended that the book amounted to “fair criticism on matters of compelling public interest”.
At a sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Mr Shadrake was also fined S$20,000 (US$15,400) and ordered to pay costs of S$55,000. The prison sentence was lighter than the 12-week term sought by the prosecution.
M. Ravi, Mr Shadrake’s lawyer, had urged the court to censure the author rather than imprison him. “This is by far the most serious sentence [for contempt]. It is the harshest punishment so far [for this offence in Singapore],” Mr Ravi said.
Mr Shadrake was arrested in his hotel room after travelling to Singapore to publicise the book in July. The Singapore authorities have said that charges of criminal defamation are also being considered.
Overseas human rights campaigners condemned the proceedings. Phil Robertson, deputy director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Singapore was “damaging its poor reputation on free expression by shooting the messenger bearing bad news”.
The Singapore authorities have robustly dismissed claims that the courts discriminate against individuals on grounds of nationality, background or status.
Ministers are unapologetic about restrictions on free speech, however, which they say are essential to prevent conflicts between the prosperous island’s mainly Chinese, Indian and Malay population groups.
K. Shanmugam, the law minister, said in a speech in New York two weeks ago that Singapore’s “small society” could not withstand the impact of US-style media freedoms.
“For example, the faultlines in our society, along racial and religious lines, can easily be exploited,” he told an audience at Columbia University.
Singapore’s controls on expression include a state-supervised and mainly state-owned media, tough libel laws and restrictions on street gatherings of more than four people.
Mr Shanmugam questioned the objectivity of organisations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based press freedom organisation, and Freedom House, a US group that campaigns for civil liberties.
RWB ranks Singapore 136th in the world for press freedom, below Iraq and Zimbabwe, while Freedom House has angered Singapore by ranking it below Guinea, where more than 150 anti-government protesters were last year killed during a rally.
“I suspect that our rankings are at least partly due to the fact that we take an uncompromising attitude on libel – and the fact that we have taken on almost every major newspaper company [in the world],” Mr Shanmugam said.
Singapore, with a population of 5m, also imposes heavy penalties on criminal offenders, including caning for violence and vandalism, and the death penalty for murder and drug trafficking. It has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
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The bill, which is expected to pass the National Assembly later this month, would let book publishers set e-book prices. The idea is to prevent publishers from being undercut by the likes of Amazon or Apple.
The French Senate has passed the first reading of a bill that would allow book publishers to set a fixed price on e-books, in a bid to try to protect publishers and smaller retailers as the e-book market takes off.
But since the first reading on October 26, several objections have been raised – not least of which are whether the law is even legal.
An extension of a 30-year-old law
The law proposed by centre-right senators Catherine Dumas and Jacques Legendre aims to replicate the 1981 Lang Law, which prohibits the sale of physical books for less than five per cent below a cover price set by the publisher.
This law has proved popular in France, helping to maintain one of Europe’s best networks independent bookstores by protecting them from competition from large chains.Dumas and Legendre’s bill was the result of a year of consultations with writers, publishers and retailers, who are concerned that their revenues will be hit by the expanding online market. But for now, industry figures show that e-books make up less than one per cent of France’s book market, but that is expected to double in the next year.
“In 2011, we will see the beginning of a really strong market,” said Clément Hering, an analyst with Gfk, in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
“Till now, it’s been quite a tiny market because of the price of products, which is quite high in France, and the number of platforms that are selling e-books which is quite tiny too, but that is changing.”
According to Hering, the e-book market so far has been a way of generating extra revenue for publishers rather than something that erodes profits, but that could change. In the US, digital literature accounts for more than eight per cent of the book market.
Enforcability remains an issue
But as the Internet is international, it is difficult to see how this law will work in practice. There seems little to stop a French consumer buying a book from a website based in another country, unless the government decides to geo-block e-book retailer websites. Otherwise, a French consumer could just as easily buy the same title at a lower price from Belgium or Luxembourg.
Another more serious obstacle is the European Court of Justice - this protectionist measure might turn out to run contrary to the idea of a single European market.
The Court has dealt with similar cases, including ones resulting from the Lang law, by determining whether the rule would be discriminatory against imports.”If they would be discriminatory then, prima facie, they would be unlawful unless the state imposing the restriction would be able justify it in some way.” said Angus Johnston, an EU law specialist at Oxford University.
The protection of national culture can be adduced as a justification, but Johnston says it is difficult to argue that a country’s literary heritage is protected by allowing the country itself rather than the importer to set the price of a book.
“On the face of it seems it would be challengeable successfully under EU free trade law,” he added.
Slowing innovation
The French parliament will take up the debate again in the next few weeks, when an amended version of the bill will be brought before both houses a final time before it can be signed into law.
Another problem with the proposed law, industry watchers said, is that it may inhibit innovation in this relatively new marketplace. The bill doesn’t make a distinction between books that are distribut
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Win or lose at the Scotiabank Giller Prize on Nov. 9,it will be business as usual at Gaspereau Press.
For the first time in its 13-year history, the small, Kentville, N.S. book publishers and printing business has a book in the running for Canada’s most prestigious literary award, Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel The Sentimentalists.
About 800 copies of the book were printed when it was first published a year ago; roughly half sold prior to the novel’s unexpected appearance on the Giller longlist at the end of September. The remaining copies were gobbled up by the time the title made the five-book shortlist in early October. Since then, Gaspereau’s five-person operation has been printing about 1,000 copies a week — the maximum it can handle, given other demands and book publisher responsibilities.
“Whether we win or lose, I’ll continue to make about 1,000 books a week, as long as there is a demand,” says co-owner Andrew Steeves, who runs the business with partner Gary Dunfield.
“One of the problems is that you can’t just drop everything else you do. We’re a local print shop. Long after the Giller goes away, I’ve got other clients. I can’t afford to alienate them. So I have to balance all that stuff.”
This is not remotely the way it will go down if any of the other four publishers with a book in the hunt cashes in.
The Giller, in addition to rewarding the winning author with a cheque for $50,000, is an instant boon to sales. Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, the most recent beneficiary of what is commonly known in the book publishers industry as the “Giller Effect,” moved 75,000 hardcover copies after winning last year and continues to sell well in paperback.
Publishers are ready to capitalize, sometimes within minutes of the announcement of the winner just before 10 p.m. at the gala’s live telecast.
Windsor’s small Biblioasis, which also has never produced a previous Giller finalist, already has a plan to print as many as 25,000 additional copies of Alexander MacLeod’s debut short story collection Light Lifting.
“As I understand it we won’t even have to call the printers, if against all odds we win,” says publisher Dan Wells. “They’ll be watching at the same time and when it’s announced, they can flick a switch and start printing.”
House of Anansi, a mid-sized Toronto publisher, has produced seven Giller finalists but no winners. The company hasn’t settled on a firm number yet for Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, the only book this year to also be nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award, but president Sarah MacLachlan expects to order a print run of 40,000 copies, if the book wins.
“You talk to basically everybody that would sell a Giller book — the wholesalers, the chain, the independents — and you ask them what they think they will go through,” MacLachlan says.
“We are making a calculated decision. We’re not doing it because that looks like the right number in our heads. Historically, the repercussions have been big, so we’re like lawyers: We work on precedent.”
HarperCollins Canada, a rarity this year as the lone multi-national subsidiary in the mix, will undertake a similar reckoning in the event that David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris takes the prize.
The decision on how many copies to print will be made early Wednesday morning, but company sales and marketing vice-president Leo MacDonald anticipates something on the order last year’s Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which sold 40,000 copies in Canada. The company’s previous Giller wins came in 2001 with Richard
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