Rising popularity of e-books among Young Indians

It was in 2012 that the first e reader made an appearance in India. It was welcomed with some enthusiasm but much skepticism. Indians love the smell of paper, the feel of a book and the pleasure of reading curled up in bed with a cup of coffee. This cold electronic steel and chrome contraption was no match to the romantic world of words, the naysayers felt.

The story turned out a little different though. Today, all major publishers have converted their list to e-books, Kindle is seeing a double-digit growth and their growth momentum picked up even more when they started offering content in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Gujarati.

The growth of e-books has been steady and significant and that is why every publisher wants a part of this pie. And looking at the number of people using mobile phones, Juggernaut books decided to tap into the smartphone market. They created an app for books which would run on a smartphone and so one could read digitally on the move without having to buy an e reader. They have close to a million downloads of the app; four lakh books get downloaded in a year and they have 650,000 users of website. And there are other sites like Dailyhunt, Pratilipi etc which get a lot of readers.

The tremendous growth and success of e-books is not just limited to English but in other languages too. This is because technology is now within reach. Young Indians are consuming large amount of data and they are comfortable with reading digitally. The format in which books come to them has also evolved- the fonts can increase, screens can be backlit, the flipping and scrolling is ergonomically designed, bookmarks are in place and it even costs less than buying a physical book.

So, it’s a fact that the digital market is here to stay though it will cohabit with print books. There will be physical books which you will buy to read and keep on bookshelves at home. Though small homes in urban areas make even space crunch for books a real problem. But there will be a lot of books which you would want to read while on the go without the trouble of lugging it around-- it can be done on your reader or smartphone.

Just a couple of months back a Chinese e-book company set the stock market aflutter when it opened for trading in Hong Kong stock exchange. China Literature has a catalogue of 9.6 million works from 6.4 million authors! Its apps provide not just new material in different formats but lets readers engage with the authors and read a portion of a book for free. The same facility is available on the Juggernaut app too which also has a writing platform where anyone can publish their work. Juggernaut is soon planning to start a subscription service which will increase its user base many fold.

For the publishers it has helped create a market which is unshackled by distribution woes and technology has made e-book conversions in e format cheaper, easier and better and helped them reach out to a younger, more tech savvy reader.

As a reader, the advent of e-books has meant that there are more avenues and writers to choose from. No one knows what you are reading and you can read what you like without any social hang ups. Read where ever and whenever you feel like --while commuting, in a car or a metro or even in your bed! E-books are easy on the wallet too and once you have read it its stored in the virtual world, so you don’t need to worry about where to keep all the books that you have! And if you care about all those trees then e-books means you save a few trees too.