The publishing industry in India is old.  The 200 years of British rule had a profound impact on Indian education as well as publishing. The Britishers had a very limited purpose.  They had to provide English education to their children while they were in India and at the same time train a limited number of Indians to do their office jobs - mostly clerical in nature.  Hence only a handful of schools, colleges and universities came into existence and all these had a very little or no impact on country's mass illiteracy. By the beginning of the twentieth century some British Publishers such as Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Blackie's etc. set up their offices in India to capture the market for text books for Indian schools and colleges.

The printing industry also did not come up properly. The printing presses were imported into the country either by the government or by the Christian Missioneries for their own use.  The Indian firms were not in a position to own printing presses because of the high cost of imported machines and the technology, by then, was not available in the country. But this did not deter the publishers in Indian languages to bring out a large number of  revolutionary books which had tremendous impact on the country's on-going freedom struggle movement. By 1947 when India gained independence, the publishing industry in the country was not properly developed. Yet publishing in Indian languages was quite active by then. The scene on english publishing was dominated by a few British publishers who were interested to supply to the assured market for school and college text books.

The post-independence era saw phenomenal changes in the publishing industry. With the rapid increase in the number of educational institutions in the country, the Indian publishers started entering into the field. In 1961, the government set up the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). By late 1960's all the states of India set up its (state) textbook boards. The NCERT developed model textbooks for schools for adoption and publication by the state textbook boards. That means there was virtual nationalisation of school text books in the country. This brought in a new trend in the publishing industry in the country as till that time the scene was dominated by the private publishers.

Even today, the   government is the largest publishing house in India. The NCERT, the State Text Book Boards, the National Book Trust (NBT), the Publication Division of the Government of India taken together must be contributing the largest share of the publishing industry in the country  both in terms of volume (number of titles published and copies printed per title) and value of production.

The publishing firms in the private sector is also quite large in number and these are scattered throughout the country. But majority of these are very small in operation and each one of these may not be producing more than a dozen titles in a year. These are also confined to producing titles in Indian regional languages and catering to the needs of the local markets. Only a few (about 10%) of the publishing concerns in India are reasonably large producing more than 50 titles annually and are equipped with proper infrastructures such as printing presses and distribution networks. In totality, today Indian publishing is one of the greatest in the world and the country is counted among the top seven publishing nations.

The Market Size

While publishing industry is quite old in India, the statistics on publishing are very poor in the country.  Even data on number of publishers and number of titles produced are either non-existent or outdated. This is because no systematic research has been carried out in the country on publishing industry except the one undertaken by the National council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) during 1976. The NCAER undertook another study on the problems of small publishers in 1985. But both these studies are quite old and thus have lost their significance today, especially to fulfil the informational requirements.

Thus, we have very scanty information on publishing activities in the country. The estimation of the size of the market, is therefore,  a guessing game. One reliable source of statistics on Indian publishing is the National Bibliographic Centre (NBC) at the National Library Calcutta who compiles the language-wise data on the titles received by it under the Delivery of Books Act. Table 6.1   presents these data for the period 1990-91 to 1995-96. The number of titles, as evident from the table, are either declining or constant during the period. It is observed from the table that English language has the maximum share (40% in ‘95-96) in total titles published followed by languages like Bengali, Hindi and Tamil. The data from National Library, however, do not present the real picture on titles published in the country because many publishers do not send a copy of each of the  published titles as required under the Act.  As experts suggest, the number of titles would be more by at least 20 per cent in the case of English language and by 30 percent for other languages. The book division of Chemicals & Allied Product Export Promotion Council (CAPEXIL) estimates the number of new titles published in the country at about 50,000 per annum. Even this seems to be a underestimate.

Fortunately, the Federation of  Indian Publishers (FIP) in recent times had compiled the latest statistics on Indian book publishing, which was published in a book titled " 50 Years of Book Publishing in India since Independence". According to this source about 11,000 publishers in India bring out nearly 60,000 titles in a year. To be more specific, in 1997 57,386 books were published in the country in 17 Indian languages and English, which had a share of about 22 per cent.  The FIP data which were collected through various Indian languages publishers' associations appear to be more reliable compared to the incomplete information provided by NBC & the CAPEXIL.

Even if number of titles published in a year is known with certainty, the estimation of publishing market in India remains difficult. There is no consensus over average print runs per title and average price of a title. The print runs for a title can be as high as one lakh for a popular novel and can be even a few hundreds for another. Similar is the case with the variability in prices. 

The Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) of the Govt. of India conducts  an Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) covering manufacturing units registered under the Factories Act 1948. The results of the survey are presented for two and three digit National Industrial Classification (NIC) level for all the states as well as for All India. The data on value of output for printing and publishing industry (NIC Industry group 285) for the last ten years available from this source (table 6.2) shows that the value of output is growing at an average rate of 12.6 percent per annum. Taking this growth rate into account, the value of output for the year 1996-97 could be estimated at about Rs.1267 crores.

Table  6.1 : Languagewise   No. of  Publications Received Under the Delivery of Books Act

Source : National Library, Calcutta

The figures provided by the ASI related to printing and publishing industry together and as such they do not publish data exclusively for the publishing industry. The Annual Survey, as mentioned earlier, covers only registered factories under the Factories Act, i.e. factories employing  10 or more workers using power or those employing 20 or more workers without the use of  power. But there are large number of publishing firms in the country employing less than 10 workers which do not come under the purview of ASI. Therefore, data provided by ASI do not include  numerous small publishing concerns. If we assume the value of printing which should be deducted from above figures is equivalvent to the value of output from small firms (employing less than 10 workers), which should have been included, the figures presented in table 6.2 represent a fair picture of the actual value of output from the publishing industry in the country. The discussions with the experts from the private publishing industry also provides the basis for such an approximation. According to a number of experts, the total turnover of the book publishing industry in India is the range of Rs.1000 crores. Given the factor that if large number of publishing firms are from the public sector and since no information is known about the public-private breakup in the total industry, the industry's turnover as suggested by private publishing experts can be an underestimation. Therefore, it would be reasonable to consider the estimated figure of Rs.1267 crores as the closest to the reality. 

Table 6.2 : Value Of Output In Printing & Publishing Industry  in India During  1984-85 to 1993-94

Source : Annual Survey of Industries(various years), Central Statistical Organisation, Govt. of   India

Extent of Piracy

As mentioned earlier (chapter II), the piracy of literary works takes three principal forms. These are:   1) wholesale reprinting of trade & text books, 2) unauthorised translations and 3) commercial photocpying of books and journals. With the advent of digital technology the piracy of literary works is taking a new dimension. The piracy problems relating to digital publishing will be discussed separately in the later part of this chapter. In India piracy in literary works is synonymous with book piracy as other copyrighted materials of this segment such as newspaper, magazines and other periodicals  are not pirated much. Among the books, text books and popular novels are pirated most as they have a large demand base.

The extent of piracy can be found out from the of sale of pirated books as a proportion to the total sales either in units or in value terms. But we have discussed earlier in this chapter that we do not have any data on number of books published in the country. We could only estimate the value of production coming from the publishing industry. But again for finding the extent of piracy we need to have the figures on pirated sales, which, unfortunately are not available from any secondary sources.

During our survey we had enquired on book piracy from the concerned target groups comprising publishers, booksellers and  reading community (end users). The responses received from these categories are more than other forms of the Copyright Industry. 92 publishers, 141 booksellers and 123 readers responded to our survey. The findings are also noteworthy. The average piracy levels during 1994-95 to 1996-97 as perceived by the publishers and booksellers are presented in table 6.3. The perception of these two different groups do not differ much. The piracy levels vary between 15% to 24% during the period under consideration. About 33% (30 out of 92) of the publishers are aware of some kind of violation of copyright in their own works. 31% of the authorised sellers (44 out of 141) also felt that their books are pirated. Among buyers, 28% of the respondents (34 out of 123) admitted buying pirated books. Of these, as high as 82% bought pirated books knowingly. On an average an enduser found to buy a total of 37 (number) books in a year, of which of 7 were pirated. This shows the extent of piracy   at 19 percent level.

Table 6.3: Average Piracy Level in Literary Works

Source : NPC Survey

Regarding type of books pirated most, publishers opinion do not differ much from that of book sellers. Both  these categories of respondents feel novels/fictions are pirated most in India followed by text books  for professional courses (e.g. engineering, medical, management, etc.) and  other courses. Among different forms through which piracy takes place, according to sellers unauthorised printing/selling of books is above all others. The next important form is found to be the large scale photocopying (Table 6.4). More than 55% of the endusers as revealed by the survey, arrange photocopies of books in varying degrees. The detailed information on the extent of photocopying by endusers are presented in Table 6.5.

Table 6.4: Different forms of Book Piracy (as perceived by sellers)

No. of Respondents giving Ranks

Source :  NPC  Survey

Table 6.5:  Extent of Photocopying by Endusers

Source:    NPC Survey

Trade Loss 

Book piracy brings in losses to the publishers and the authors in terms of reduced sales and non-receipt of royalty respectively. But such losses could not be known to the publishers or authors as they might not be knowing the extent of piracy with respect to their works. This might be the reason why only a few publishers could provide information on losses. In 1996-97, while 30 publishers admitted about the awareness on piracy of their respective works, only 5 could give some estimate of losses. This is not surprising.

At the aggregate level we found earlier that the extent of book piracy in 1996-97 as perceived by the publishers and booksellers are estimated to be 20.8 percent and 23.6 per cent respectively. During the same year, the purchase behaviour of buyers reveal that at the endusers' level piracy percentage stood at 19%. Thus book piracy rate in the country is varying between a high of 24% (as perceived by the book sellers) to a low of 19% (as revealed by the endusers). To arrive at a single figure, if we take the average of these three figures, the overall piracy percent in 1996-97 will be about 21%. Taking this figure, the estimated loss suffered by the book publishing industry in the country during 1996-97 is found to be about Rs.266 crores.

Digital Publishing & Piracy

The rapid advances in the field of information technology (IT) are affecting the society in more than one way. The new technologies have brought in considerable changes in almost all activities of human life be it manufacturing, trade & business, art or culture. The publishing industry is also no exception as we see the traditional printing & publishing activities are fast giving way to electronic publishing. Electronic publishing is a process where activities relating to publication such as submission of manuscript, formatting, editing, printing and even distribution are carried out with the help of computers and telecommunication technologies. In its simplest form electronic publishing describes a situation where use of computers is confined to formatting, editing etc, but the final output is produced in the conventional print forms. The latest trend, however, is towards a paperless publication where the entire flow of information from the author to the readers takes in machine- readable forms. Technologically, electronic publishing is taking two prominent forms viz. Optical Disk (popularly known as CD-ROM) publishing and network publishing. 

Digital refers to conversion of information in binary codes i.e. in the form of one and zero, current on is one and current off is zero. In common parlance digital publishing and electronic publishing are used interchangeably though in the stricter sense of the terms these two are not identical. All electronic publications need not be digital. Digital representation affords much greater potential for adding functionality and utility to a corpus of information. Once information is digitally encoded, new tools and systems can be invented to create altogether a new form of publication. One output from the application of digital technology is 'multimedia' which is the juxtaposition of text, picture, sound, video etc. in a single medium.

Electronic publishing or its digitized version has certain definite advantages over the traditional print medium. The first and the foremost is the facility to update a document almost instantaneously which enables the readers to get the latest versions of publications. Electronic publications allow easy search of documents and thus reduces users' search time. Another advantage from the users' point of view is that he/she need not buy an entire publication to access a part information from it.   Many electronic publications are on-line and can be downloaded by an user as per his/her requirement. The new technologies are advantageous for publishers as they, especially the journal publishers, can drastically reduce their turn-around time i.e. the time lag in submission, referring, revision, editing, composing, printing, delivery etc by wide spread applications of computers and communication networks. The digital conversion allows media enhancement of existing materials with sound, animation and video etc. Electronic publications are easy to store. Conventional books take up substantial amount of shelf space, whereas a typical CD of twelve centimeter diameter can store 650 MB of information i.e. about 250,000 pages (of A4 size) of text. The digital publishing is economical too.

Network publishing is even more useful in terms of information provision and usage. The internet which is the network of networks is an enormous repository of information resources and this is growing in size every day. The most striking feature of internet is its easy accessibility. A vast world of information can be accessed in the desktops with just the click of a button. While this adds tremendous value to our activities, there are reasons for publishers/ authors to be concerned about it as in a networked environment like the internet copyright is under serious threat.

Firstly, given the sheer complexity of mixed media and interconnected rights in the digital environment determining what rights exist and how they apply to a publication under use is not an easy task. Therefore, the process of determining copyrights, tracking them and ultimately facilitating monetary compensation to the right holders for use of their works remains very complicated. Then there is the issue of what is 'free' and what is 'protected' in a vast sea of information that is available in the net. This is not always clear to the internet providers, the web users and sometimes even to the lawyers. As a result, the fear for loss of income due to unauthorized use is more in an electronic environment compared to the traditional publishing. Besides economic rights, moral rights of authors are at a grave risk of being violated by numerous users in a network.

The issue is far more complicated in case of multi-media work. Historically, copyright law has been split between different media. For example, text comes under literary works copyright , still images are artistic work copyright and moving images fall within the jurisdiction of cinematographic works copyright. In multimedia, all these are put together in a single product. Existence of a number of copyrights with different owners and perhaps with different terms of protection make a multimedia product an ideal battle ground in the cause of copyright protection.

But in spite of all these complexities, the world is moving towards the digital era simply because the advantages outnumber the disadvantages. A  huge volume of publications are made available in electronic forms daily in various part of the world, especially in the developed economies. Of late, India has also joined this bandwagon, although less vigorously. There is no centralised source for data on electronic publishing in India. But it seems to be on rise in the country. Almost all renowned newspapers and magazines are available in the web. A large number of research journals published from India can be accessed from the internet. The CD -ROM publishing, on the other hand, is catching comparatively slowly. This many be due to narrow domestic market for CD products, the computer penetration in the country being very low. But some leading institutions such as the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC) and the National Institute for Science Communication (NISCOM) are playing predominant roles in bringing out various scientific publications in CD-ROMs (e.g. Asian Health, Environmental & Allied Databases (AHEAD)  published by NISCOM, CD-ROM on Indian Patents and the National Union Catalogue of Scientific Serials brought out by INSDOC etc.) Besides these, CD-ROMs are also available on other areas like Indian mythology (The Panchatantra by the Padmini Multimedia), tourism (Information on Goa & Taj Mahal by Kirloskar Computer Services)  and info-educational products (Mystica India from Magic Software) etc. to cater to the needs of millions of endusers located in India & abroad.

It is needless to say that elsewhere in the world including in India electronic publishing in spite of its versatilities, remains a soft target of the pirates for reasons well known by now. The solution to this problem lies in strengthening copyright laws by plugging the loopholes exposed by the new technologies and adoption of an appropriate Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS) which is also practicable. The technological handicaps in India have remained as a depressing factor in the spared of copyright  piracy in electronic environment. The dissemination of electronic data to a large extent depends on the degree of developments accomplished in information technology-both hardware & software and telecommunications. Production and use of electronic publishing involves considerable cost in terms of initial investment in computers and telephone lines by publishers, libraries, endusers and all concerned. Given the high prices of hardware and software in the country, only a select few from these groups (may be the elite ones), can afford to access electronic publication at the individual level. 

Besides cost aspects, there is the question of 'mindset. In India, the mindset is not favouring fast replacement of traditional print media by digital publications. The reasons could be many. For example, the readers may not get the same degree of pleasure from reading an electronic publication as compared to the 'printed books/journals. The traditional print media has the ease of being read at one's convenience. On the contrary, digital publications are machine dependant and therefore could not be carried outside as easily as the printed materials. The availability of lap tops with CD-ROM drive is changing the balance. But many people do not like reading substantial amount of information from computer screen as it may be tiring for the eyes, especially if information are of low resolution.  The authors also may not like to publish their works electronically. The basic purpose of publishing for an author is to get recognition in the academic circle. However, in electronic publishing the authorship remains to some extent intangible. Apart from these psychological factors digital publishing is not picking up in India as fast as in the developed world due to lack of infrastructural facilities in the vital IT and telecom sectors. Even though it is admitted that IT infrastructure is being developed in the country with a sense of priority and internet users are increasing manifold every year (e.g. between March 1998 & 1999 the number of internet subscribers has increased from 85,000 to 2,40,000 i.e. by a amazing growth of 180%), the digital piracy at present is only a potential problem in the Indian Context. But it would be wise to act before the problem actually knocks at our door.