There was an article in the Business Standard yesterday that got me wondering. Will e-readers improve the adoption of e-books in India? While the answer might seem an inevitable yes, the main point to be considered is how gradual the adoption will be. Today, India’s PC penetration is around 30% in households, the over all internet user base is 7% of the population.

In the West, a computer or a laptop (now a tablet seems to be making the list) is a must before going to college. Students are encouraged to get their laptops to class, and many take notes on the laptop. In India, the laptop in most colleges (I come from an engineering institution) is more of an entertainment device. E-books are used, not for their inherent merit, but because normal books are expensive.

I have entered into the e-book / normal books debates with a lot of people, and surprisingly, everyone (including myself) prefers normal books. While my reasons stem more from the ‘feel of reading’, a lot of arguments opposing e-books come from the fact that it is too uncomfortable, they can’t read easily on the computer, it hurts their eyes etc. etc.

Simply put, not many people in India are that well connected with tech. It’s not as if we don’t know, it’s more of a don’t care. We really don’t feel the need to live in a connected world where we need our e-mail on access, where we take notes on Notepad (or OneNote) as opposed on a notepad, where Googling a place is easier than asking for directions.

In my opinion, you may publish thousands of articles on How e-books are better or How a Physical copy is better. While points on the same side of the argument are relevant, one stands out “You don’t Own an E-book the way you own an actual book” All you own is the right to read digital content, not the content itself. And there’s the lack of a personal relationship with the book that bilbliophiles consider important.

This requires a change in mind-set, not just towards e-books but towards everything that is technology, Internet and connected. This includes mobile internet (and using it for a lot more than Facebook access), e-Commerce, e-mail on the go, storing data in the cloud, not all of which have that great adoption rates in India. (While WATBlog readers might actually use all of these and more, please understand that you are a small tech-savvy percentage of the unnamed millions).

A similar argument does not work with the West. It’s not just the educated masses argument. Even our educated masses simply do not take up technology as fast as they do there. Even in college, where everyone has a laptop, most if not all assignments are hand-written. And if not hand-written, at least printed.

Today, you hear reports of how the Digital Publishing Subscriptions will hit $3 Billion by 2014. Popular magazines like the IEEE Spectrum (ok, maybe not ‘popular’ per se, but it has its fans), are offering Digital Alternatives to cut back on postage costs (they also propagate the ‘It’s environment-friendly’ line). People like Seth Godin have decided that he’s not very keen on ‘printing’ his books anymore. Why? Because the effort is not worth it. It’s not just easier to publish an e-book, an e-book is easier to access.

But does this mentality work in India? Not really. While newspapers in the West are trying to improve their e-front while simultaneously trying to salvage the little money the print editions make, the Indian Newspaper is growing in average readership. However, the point I was trying to elucidate earlier is echoed again in the way the digital editions of these newspapers function. Very few have links to related articles except at the bottom. The way I read a news article (and I get most of my tech news from feeds or blogs) is like this : I see something I don’t know about, I google it. What’s easier than Googling? If the author has a link to an article which will explain it. If you mention a study, linking to it helps – something online newspapers don’t do quite often (or maybe they aren’t allowed to – I should enquire). I was extremely surprised when I saw the Times of India have inline links with their articles (of course, they were merely – find more articles on X (much like the New York Times ), but it’s a start. Surprisingly, more tech-savvy newspapers like the Mint don’t have links.

Though this might not be directly relevant to ebooks, it’s a significant indication of how the Indian public reaches out to Digital Media. Today, Digital Content seems synonymous with YouTube videos. Even if an ebook is popular, it’s mainly so because of its print version.

Which brings to another aspect of the argument. The way it is now, an e-book version is quite expensive. Though people may claim that you recover the cost of the Kindle or the iPad eventually if you rely on ebooks, it probably wouldn’t work for Indians. Recently Stieg Larsson’s “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” from his Millennium series was doing the rounds on the tech blogs. The Kindle version of the book had outsold it’s hardcover version. One Million Copies of the book were sold. In the June of 2010, Amazon was selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Amazon’s total e-book sales in the first six months of 2010 have tripled over the first half of 2009. In India, the Kindle version is simple too expensive. Priced at $8.64 (equivalent to INR 393) when the paperback is available at INR 256 from online sellers and probably at Rs. 50 on the streets (Indian Reprint, of course). India also does not have an e-book store that can match up to the standards of Amazon and have prices at significantly lower rates. I had some hopes from EC Media’s Wink and its Wink Store, but I checked it out today. Not only is the site unnavigable, it does not have a good collection and the few books that it does have seem quite exorbitantly priced (except of course the classics, which are priced at INR 50 – which makes me wonder why I would want to pay INR 29.95  for Wuthering Heights when I can get it free (legitimately) from Gutenberg ).

Yes, with ebooks, you can annotate, you may be able to Google terms, you won’t have to have a lummox of dictionary near you, you can cross-reference, and you may hold your breath as long as you like while you rant out the merits of an ebook. But would anyone in India actually pay MORE for an ebook than a physical copy? I highly doubt it. And unless we have an Indian e-book store, it will definitely cost more.

The popularity of e-books, in my opinion, is not facilitated by technology. I doubt the iPad, even when released will help sell many iBooks. What will help increase the popularity of e-books is a change in mindset, and a cheap Indian e-book store. Feel free to disagree.

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