This presentation aims to describe e-books landscape in India and how the libraries are promoting e-book culture. The presenter examines the barriers to wide spread adoption of e-books in India and discusses importance for libraries to raise awareness through advocacy.

1. Maitrayee Ghosh
Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow
Florida State University , Tallahassee, FL

2. Background:
At present e-books consumption in India is much slower than UK or US
but future of e-books is promising due to the fact that India is the world's
third largest English speaking country with a huge English language
book market. Bowker Market Research’s Global e-book Monitor reveals
that the market for e-books is set for a rapid increase in Brazil and India.
Over 50 percent of respondents from these two countries said that they
are likely to buy an e-book; Australia, India, the UK and the US
are leading the world in eBook adoption rates.

3. In. dia’s population is nearly 1.3 billion. It is being forecasted
that e-book adoption in India will rise due to high level of
mobile density in rural India, especially smartphones, phablets
and tablets, as primary access channel. Bowker’s Global e-book
Monitor conducted a online survey in 10 countries in
early 2012 showed that India is doing fairly well in terms of e-book
purchase, with significant number of respondents having
bought an e-book in the previous six months.

4. E-book readers in India:
India is known for its wide disparities, especially in language, the
initiative to develop regional language e-reader is the latest trend, for
example Samnsung Galaxy smartphone and tablets (Galaxy Grand,
Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Tab 3) support 9 Indian languages.
The mobile penetration in India is one of the highest in the world.
Indian e-book market, which had finally started to really ignite in
2013, is growing not due to e-reader sales but because people are
reading on their smartphones. The phablet is a combination of half-phone
& half-tablet (smartphones with screen sizes between 5-inch
and 6.99-inch) eliminating the need for two devices.Phablets emerge
as popular e-reader in India and its sale has been increasing
impressively.

5. E-book readers for Indian languages
Name of the product Descriptions Price
AKASH (low cost tablet by
DATAWIND)
7 inch Capacitive touch screen,
Android 4.0.3 ICS OS,1 GHz Cortex A8
processor. High quality Video
Streaming & HD Quality Video
Playback.
General price
US$ 90
US$ 20 (student
version)
Epustak (e-book reader-local
made)
7" LED Screen & 300 grams;
Educational content of the 1st to 10th
standard, supports English, and
Marathi; 3 hours battery backup.
Developed
under
E-prashala
project.
Wink (EC Media
International – a Bangalore
based co.)
Linux based operating system,
supports 15 language. The Wink store
offers a large number of e-books.
US$ 150
Wishtel IRA tablets for
native Indian languages
Google Android 2.2, include eBook
reader app for Hindi and other
languages , as well as course content
for ICSE, CBSE and state boards.
US$ 90
Infibeam Pi e-book reader The device has an e-book store, a
website for customers to purchase
digital content, and a digital platform
US$130

6. Infibeam Pi e-book
reader- Infibeam is an e-commerce
company in India
launched Pi that looks like the
Amazon Kindle, with six inch
e-Ink screen and capability to
read word documents.
180 mm height, width
118 mm
E Ink Vizplex with
Resistive Touch & Epson
Display controller
File supported: PDF,
EPUB, HTML, TXT,
RTF, MOBI, PRC,
DOC
Page forward/backward
Jump to a specific page;
Progress bar to display
position in the book
Black & White 8/16
grayscale,Screen
Rotate for landscape /
portrait views
It supports 13 Indian
Languages.
Infibeam is
collaborating with the
National Council of
Educational Research
and Training to make
textbooks in digital
format.

7. E-book readers in India:
The Datawind’s creation Pocketsurfer 3G5 is
optimistic to bridge the digital divide in India; It is
developed by the same company that produced cheap
Aakash tablet. The Pocketsurfer 3G5 looks like a
smartphone but has a large screen 3G Android device
— a phablet, with an affordable price US$ 110
(INR 6,499)

8. Advocacy and initiatives to promote e-book culture
The regional and national literature festivals and the
aggressive promotional techniques adopted to enhance reading
culture and educate the people about e-books is a good sign
towards advocacy.
Many publishers see that smartphone as the main platform
for digital reading, especially e-readers such as the Kindle
failing to take off in a big way in India.
Broadband for villages- An ambitious Central Government
initiative to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to
2.5 lakh gram panchayats(village) across the country.
E-prashala is not only catering the needs of rural India but
the products are being appreciated and put to use in the
metros. http://www.indiamart.com/pc-clinic/eprashala.html
10 lakhs= 1 million

9. The technology and expertise for digitisation in India has
improved tremendously, with a strong talent pool not only
digital-savvy but also has multimedia and animation skills.
Technology companies like Accenture, Tata Interactive,
Aptara, and hundreds of smaller players are involved in
digitising local content.
i-Musti Inc.is working with small publishers to digitize
Indian books, some of which went out of print ages ago in
regional languages.
Pothi.com enables authors and publishers to publish and
sell e-books through it's platform. They can upload their e-books,
set their price and sell it through Pothi.com's store.
The ebook retailer and manufacturer of e-reader devices
Kobo will launch in India “soon.” Kobo has been in
discussions with Indian publishers, including those haven’t
yet started to digitization.

10. Initiatives to promote e-book culture
The e-Book portal for e-Books being subscribed by Biju Patnaik
central library, NIT Rourkela was launched on May 2, 2014, which
includes bibliographical detail of subscribed e-books with link to
full text.

11. INFLIBNET’s initiatives in e-books collection development
The higher education system in India is large and complex. India has
the third largest higher education system in the world, behind China
and the United States comprising of more than 471 universities,
22064 affiliated colleges(India, MHRD, 2009).Indian libraries in
tertiary level institutions are acquiring a large number of e-books
through consortia because academic e-books cost substantially more
than print editions. There are two major consortia : INDEST-AICTE
for technical institutions and UGC-INFONET for universities.

12. National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for
Scholarly Content(N-LIST)- Extending access to e-books to colleges.
From Year 2014, NLIST Program is subsumed under UGC-INFONET
Digital Library Consortium as college Component. The colleges in
India are eligible to get access e-resources under NLIST Programme.
As on Jun 24 2014, a total number of 3792 colleges have registered
themselves with the N-LIST programme.

13. Barriers to e-book growth in India:
Although the Indian readers are aware of the advantages of
e-books, they continue to prefer and use printed
publications.
The reasons are:
lack of electronic content in Indian languages and
lack of proliferation of ICT tools in rural areas which
constitute a major chunk of the Indian population-although
technological advancements in e-books arena
(for example availability of regional language e-reader
etc.) are available but not as much, when compared to
large population use basic phone due to economically
backward status.

14. Concluding remarks:
The trend of reading e-books started in India two years back.
However in coming years there are good chances of boom this
industry and lot of promise in the Indian e-books market due
to digitization of content in regional languages and a huge
pool of upcoming writing talent. In India, Internet penetration
is still low, but mobile penetration is very high. So India is a
huge buyers’ and readers market in terms of handhelds and
digital content. Publishers don’t need to go far away to source
new books because both client and service providers are
available in abundance.
India is developing an ecosystem to make eBook publishing
and access easier and the eBook industry is bound to boom in
the coming years!