As an American, and an "outsider" viewing the scene from across the ocean, Indian publishing seems insanely diverse and almost incomprehensible. And it doesn’t help that there are virtually no Indian works published in translation in the English-speaking world. It’s true that many Indian writers who write in English have been commercially successful—including Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, and Rohinton Mistry, to name a few—but it’s extremely rare for an Indian author writing in a language other than English to be published outside of India.

Trying to draw a parallel between the US and India doesn’t help, either. There’s no doubt that New York is the centre of the U.S. publishing world, and that a few corporate publishers are responsible for producing a significant percentage of the titles that are read throughout the country. Furthermore, a handful of retail outlets—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon—provide almost all readers with access to all books being published. In India none of this is true. There are huge publishing houses (Penguin India, etc.), but there’s no single publishing city (Mumbai and New Delhi are both extremely important). There are over 16,000 publishers, and the bookselling/distribution situation is continuing to expand instead of contract and consolidate.

One key issue for the future is the expansion of multinational companies into India. These publishers are destined to have a huge impact on the industry as a whole—an impact that will shape the future of what publishing will look like twenty years down the road.

India’s publishing industry is one of great growth and opportunity. The literacy rate in India is almost 65 per cent (in the time of Independence this figure was closer to 30 per cent). Growth in the publishing sector is phenomenal, clocking in at a rate of 10-30 per cent a year. Numbers about the actual production and sales of books in India are sketchy. The estimate that shows up again and again is that there are approx. 70,000 new books published in India every year. A figure that, while impressive, is rather small when put into per capita terms.

There are also debates on the breakdown of these publications by language, but the commonly accepted figure is that 30 per cent of all books are published in English, slightly more than that are in Hindi, with the rest in one of the other 20 official languages of India. In terms of sheer publication numbers, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, and Malayalam, are the languages that immediately follow Hindi and English.

The history of foreign publishers entering the Indian marketplace is a bit checkered. Obviously, a number of British companies have long had a presence in India. Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and a few others, were set up in India at the beginning of the twentieth century to ensure UK publications were used in schools and colleges.

American publishers came along a bit later and shifted the marketplace in a way that was quite damaging to the local publishers. Because of the subsidies paid to India as part of Public Law 480, the Indo-American Textbook Program allowed American publishers to receive huge subsidies to reprint textbooks for college students at very low prices. That’s great for readers, but as Britain and Russia instituted similar subsidy programs, the local Indian publishers were quite literally forced out of a potentially lucrative market, one that could’ve helped the industry to grow and diversify.

This program ended in the early seventies, around the same time that the Indian government established the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), which ensured that at least 60 per cent of any foreign corporation present in India was controlled by Indian companies/people. When the FERA was enacted, many publishers entered into joint partnerships with Indian firms. These partnerships, along with restrictions on imports, allowed the local English-language scene to expand greatly, as these new-look houses set up domestic programs, publishing local writers instead of simply importing titles from their U.S./UK branches.

A noble example of this is Penguin India, which was set up in 1987 in partnership with an Indian businessman, and quickly became one of the largest publishers of Indian literature, not just in English, but in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, and Malayalam as well. Penguin India has done a lot of translation, and has distributed books from a number of overseas presses to Indian readers. According to Penguin India CEO Mike Bryan, today 50 per cent of their titles published are from Indian writers, with 95 per cent of all books coming out in English. Ninety per cent of HarperCollins’s list is from Indian writers, with 15 per cent of their books being published in Hindi.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of multinationals opening offices in India. Hachette, HarperCollins (in partnership with The India Today Group), Random House, Routledge, Pearson Education, Picador, and even Harvard Business Publishing have all expanded into India over the past decade. The size of the Indian market and the vibrant book scene are a couple reasons for this recent surge, but, on a more cynical note, the elimination of FERA probably played a huge role as well. As of 1999, fully-owned subsidiaries of foreign companies are once again allowed to operate in India, making this sort of expansion much more profitable for the parent company.

One of the challenges all publishers - multinational or not - face in India is distribution. There are a few big chains, such as Oxford, Crossword, and Landmark, but these are primarily located in larger cities, and distributing books to readers in second- and third-tier cities remains a challenge.

Interestingly, Mike Bryan predicted that in the future, the percentage of total sales by the chains would actually decrease (for Penguin, it’s currently around 75 per cent), which could be the result of both an increase in smaller stores serving smaller populations, and an increase in the efficiency and reach of distribution companies.

It’s likely that the presence of more multinational companies in India will only improve and expand distribution and bookselling. This situation is great for books published in Hindi or English, but I doubt it’s going to have much of an effect on titles published in Tamil or Malayalam. As Kannan Sundaram from Kalachchuvadu Publications pointed out, there aren’t any chain stores that sell Tamil books, a situation that applies to any number of Indian languages. And since none of the multinationals have ventured into publishing in Tamil, this situation is pretty unlikely to change.

Obviously, Indian publishers specializing in English-language titles will face a direct challenge from the multinationals, one that will be very difficult to overcome. According to a recent report from the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), foreign publishers have made a negligible investment in India, instead repatriating all profits and taking over many Indian publishers. There have also been various complaints of the glut of remainders that have been dumped on the Indian market, which will presumably continue to expand as publishers overprint elsewhere and find it easier to try and sell these books on the cheap in India instead of pulping them.

Theoretically, the presence of companies like Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Picador, and Hachette in India should increase the number of Indian titles published in the U.S. and UK. Although that seems to be the case for Indians writing in English, in 2008 only five works of fiction and poetry originally written in Indian languages were published in the United States. And of those five works, two were from a Tamil Nadu based publishing house. It’s ridiculous to claim that the presence of foreign-owned multinationals in India is helping to spread regional literature—that is, anything not originally written in English—to readers outside of India. One possible cause of this imbalance is the lack of translators from Hindi/Tamil/Urdu/Bengali into American or British English. It’s worth noting that presses like Katha (in New Dehli) do publish a lot of books translated by Indians into English, but their titles are primarily distributed within India.

No matter what country you’re talking about, the question of e-books has to play a role in assessing what things will look like in the future. In the book "60 Years of Book Publishing in India" (ed. Dina N. Malhotra, published 2006 by the Federation of Indian Publishers), there’s a pretty aggressive anti-e-book essay. The cost of the current e-reading devices is pretty prohibitive for a lot of readers, and with the lack of an Amazon India, the Kindle isn’t even a potential player. That said, in early 2008 Penguin India signed a deal with Mobifusion, to develop content for mobile device users in India. Mobifusion has been very active in creating content for mobile phones, including the publication of a searchable version of the Bhagavad Gita specially designed for mobile phones, and mobile phone versions of books like chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s “Any Time Temptations”. Recently, Mobifusion announced a plan to launch an Oxford English Dictionary “word-a-day” text message program. As is happening in other parts of the globe, mobile phones in India are outpacing dedicated e-reading devices as the technology of choice for reading e-books.

Given all that’s laid out above, and the explosive growth of the Indian book market, the next few years promise to bring about big changes. It will be especially interesting to watch what new business models develop among the independent presses, as they continue to fight for market share and are forced to find new ways to reach readers with different solutions and innovations for the varied market segments and regions of the country.