The Indian publishing industry seems to have woken up to the emergence of the digital publishing business in the country. At a Ficci event on the publishing sector, Dolly Bhasin of SPH Consultancy and e-Services Pvt Ltd said, “Publishing market will be left behind if the digital market is not tapped into.”

“It’s no longer a matter of choice but a compulsion for the publishers," she added.

The dicussions at the event held here on Wednesday centred around the publishing industry witnessing a paradigm shift from print to digital publishing. Especially with the increasing costs of production and print, the industry is making a strenuous effort to deal with the demand for digital content as opposed to print and discussed the way forward for India to become an e-publishing base in the near future.

Ajay Malhotra, Strategic Partnerships, Google Books, said, “Publishers have to synchronise content as per devices because in this day and age they have to provide users a choice and cannot restrict them to a single device. But as far as marketers are concerned, e-books, e-readers and tablets are not conducive for advertising.” Malhotra concluded by saying, “Google e books provide a vast variety for readers to choose what you want to read and where you want to read.”

Manish Gupta, CEO, Raj Comics, mentioned names like mobile comics, ecomics in iPads and 3D stereoscopic comic which must be introduced and used extensively. Manisha Chaudhry, head, content development, Pratham Books, raised questions on the cultural production for children. She said, “Books have to reflect our culture. There is scope for contemporary reality. There is a very big market yet to be tapped of children from age group 3-14 years old and that children’s publishing is more than comics. We need to expand our business even in regional languages. And also make available material for the disabled and visually challenged.”

Chaudhry went ahead to say, “The book industry has to innovate. Just like the FMCG industry came out with shampoo sachets we also have to think about ways to innovate.”

Jai Saxena, spoke about the retail sector for children and said, “The market is ever growing for children and comics are great business. But we need to constantly upgrade and innovate, may be with the help of board games, audio books and applications in smart phones.”

The publishing industry depends on copyright to manage relationships between the relevant stakeholders. The rights and obligations of both the parties need to be clearly defined in order to manage and protect intellectual property rights (IPR) against violation.

V K Karthika, editor-in-chief, Harper Collins Publishers India Ltd, said, “So many of our book excerpts are replicated in newspapers like the recent Shoaib Akhtar book, the journalists or publishing houses do not feel the need to take any permission or mention the name of the publishers.”

She went ahead and said it’s difficult to safeguard authors’ rights, “Authors come to us and say, do you know my entire book is online. And then accuse us of not being able to protect their rights and content despite it all being copyrighted. Websites have to be legalised and authorised for replicating. Cyber space has to be made sacred.”

Sunaina Kumar, professor English and HOD, editorial unit, school of humanities, Ignou, spoke about copyrights from an academic point of view and said, “AIIMS authority did not allow replication of question papers of past years. This is the state of information related to copyright in academia; teachers and faculty don’t know the importance and need of it. IPR for educationists do not exist; they often violate it because of ignorance or carelessness.”

Hiranjana Mehra, product manager, Balani Infotech Pvt Ltd, brought out solutions to put an end to plagiarism and answers for copyright issues. She said, “The sanctity of author and publisher relationship has to be maintained. So we have come up ‘iThenticate’ which is an anti plagiarism tool. It catches paragraphs, sentences, even words if they have been lifted from an already published material. Then we also have ‘Tumitin’ which is a plagiarism software used by academic institutions for checking all thesis in their research wing.”

The PubliCon – 2011: “The Business of Publishing” is a two day event from September 29-29 organised by Ficci.