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Ebook publishers are faced with the problems of book discovery,and many are investing in strengthening their marketingefforts online, especially through social media. Exceptin the case of Penguin and Sterling, the publishers donot give information about the availability of their e-editions on their own website as yet. Many publishers areyet to adopt an integrated workflow, from manuscript creationto output, and also in following global standards formetadata.Formats and pricingPublishers in India are exploring with all formats and platforms.While most started with releasing PDFs, awarenessabout other formats is growing now. Open formats likeEPUB and MOBI are becoming popular. DRM is seen to bea solution for digital piracy, so publishers are becomingfamiliar with DRM.Publishers are experimenting with pricing too. Ebooks areavailable from as less as Rs 40 ($0.66) going up to Rs 350($6), for trade books originating in India. Ebooks sourcedfrom foreign publishers are priced higher. Since India hasbeen a market for low-priced editions, especially in tradepublishing, price was not thought to be a differentiatorwhen it came to ebooks. But that is could change soon.There is a lot of experimentation going on with pricingnorms.Earlier this year, most ebook publishers began by pricingprinted books and ebooks almost at par; or pricing theebooks, just less than the print version. With more ebookplatforms coming up, there seems to be a shift.Penguin’s title Can Love Happen Twice by Ravinder Singh,from its popular MetroReads imprint, is priced at Rs 125($2.08) in print and sells at Rs 65 ($1.08) on the Kindle storeand Flipkart. Similarly, the paperback of Immortals of Meluhaby Amish Tripathi (Westland) is priced at Rs 225 ($3.75),but both, the Kindle and Flipkart editions, are priced at Rs72 ($1.2). The nearly 50% difference in price in two editions,among the popular, commercial fiction titles are not seenin the literary fiction titles. For instance, HarperCollins’ India:A Traveller’s Literary Companion by Chandrahas Choudhuryis priced at Rs 399 ($6.7; hardback) and it’s Kindle editionis priced at Rs 314 ($5.2), whereas the Flipkart editionis priced at Rs 359 ($6).Similarly, in literary non-fiction too the difference is not50%. Hachette India’s newly revised title, 24 Akbar Roadby Rasheed Kidwai, an account of the Congress Party’s holdon the Centre, is priced at Rs 375 ($6.25) in paperback, andRs 295.45 ($5) in Kindle edition.Self publishingMany Indian authors are taking advantage of selfpublishingservices, for example those offered by CinnamonTealPrint & Publishing Service and Pothi. Amazon’s KindleDirect Programme became a greater attraction in August2012, when the company allowed authors and publishersto set Indian rupee prices on the Kindle Store. Formany of these new authors, ebook-first is a safe bet, requiringminimal investment. With Smashwords’ booksnow available on Flipkart in India, this platform is also likelyto gain interest among authors looking to self-publish.Well-known author Ashok Banker, best known for the bestsellingRamayana series (Penguin Books India), set up hisown ebook store, AKB eBooks.Com in 2011. For Banker, theattraction towards ebook publishing was not about thecost of production, but instead, it was the ease and the lowcost of distribution and purchase.The success of self-published author Amish Tripathi, whosemythological fiction series, Shiva Trilogy, earned him a $90,000 advance from publishers Westland recently, hasgiven hope to aspiring writers. Tripathi’s Immortals of Meluha,the first of the Trilogy, was first published by him inFebruary 2010. The book was re-printed thrice within thefollowing week, and by the end of July it had sold around45,000 copies across India. After the book’s initial success,Westland picked up the series for publication. The Trilogyhas sold more than 1.7 million copies in print within a twoand-halfyear period, with retail sales of over Rs 43 crore($7.17 m). It has been hailed as “the fastest selling bookseries in the history of Indian publishing.”Having foreseen an opportunity, Penguin Books Indiaalong with Author Solutions, launched a self-publishingimprint, Partridge India, in early 2013. Every Partridge Indiatitle is released in digital format as an e-book, and printformat is offered as an option.Localisation effortsThe fact that English enjoys a privileged status in India andis also the language of instruction for almost all higher educationcourses in the country, chiefly for STM subjects andprofessional courses. Publishers of Indian-language contenthave a few hurdles to surmount before e-publishingin these languages can catch up with the pace of changetaking place in English publishing. The most importantobstacle is that computing with Indic scripts has been astruggle due to the presence of multiple standards in textencoding and keyboard layouts, as well as because of poorIndic-script support on reading devices. Often fonts need81 The Global eBook Report