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ition is 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 needto be bundled with the content files. Readers require pluginsto be able to read such files on their devices. Althoughagencies of the government, not-for-profit organisations,and also technologists’ groups and industry bodies aremaking efforts, especially for adoption of UNICODE standards,there is still a distance to cover in this regard.(Some of the publishers in Indian languages who havelaunched their ebook lists, and the platforms which supportthem are mentioned in the trade e-books sectionabove.)A Tamil e-reader application, NHM Reader, was recentlylaunched by the Chennai-based publishing company, NewHorizon Media. The cloud-based ereader application, inspiredby the Kindle app and its features, is currently availablefor iOS. The app will allow readers to adjust font sizesand background colours. New Horizon Media is developingthe NHM Reader for Android devices too. The company,which has been involved in developing a series of Indianlanguagesoftware applications, also runs an online retailstore.Notes 1. Indian Youth: Demographics and Readership –Results from the National Youth Readership Survey 2009,National Book Trust, India in association with NationalCouncil of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi: 2010.See the table of contents and an executive summary here.1. Source: Vernacular Report 2012. Report by Internetand Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in associationwith IMRB International, Mumbai: January 2013.2. Source: Mobile Internet in India – December 2012.Report by Internet and Mobile Association of India(IAMAI) in association with IMRB International, Mumbai:January 2013.78 The Global eBook Report