The
Hindu
Now, it's `Passage to India' for e-publishers
By Anand Parthasarathy - Monday, Apr 12, 2004
BANGALORE, APRIL 11.
Buzzwords such as shoring and outsourcing might conjure images of
thousands of young persons in Indian call centers, while American
legislators seize on the phenomenon to garner voter sympathy in an
election year.
But a quiet electronic revolution is making this country the preferred
destination in an industry niche that rarely comes into the spotlight:
the publishing business.
Major international book and journal publishers such as Oxford and
Cambridge University Press, Prentice Hall, Macmillan, Elsevier and
Springer find it makes sound commercial sense (a price advantage like
40 per cent) to get typesetting, page-making and digitization done in
this country - either at their own Indian operations or through one of
a few dozen specialist electronic publishing agencies that have sprung
up.
Some such publishing agencies, have morphed into a one-stop shop,
where European and American publishers can outsource a major chunk of
their editorial activities - from editing to book design and
illustration, to page-proofing.
"The rich human resource in India, particularly retired graduates and
teachers in every possible subject, that we can tap here, is what
makes this our e-publishing hub," the CEO, T-Books, told The Hindu in
a telephonic talk from the U.S.
The Indian arms of European publishers such as Elsevier, Springer and
Pearson, have also reversed the trend and now send e-edited books to
their parent companies for printing rather than the other way around.
The business opportunity - estimated to be worth at least Rs. 1,000
crores annually - has also seen the emergence of smaller players, who
are extremely agile in offering e-publishing and data conversion
services in a variety of standard formats including QuarkXpress, MS
E-Book Reader and PageMaker.
British writer and wit Malcolm Muggeridge once jokingly said the last
Englishman would probably be an Indian.
In the global business of electronic publishing, at any rate, it
already looks as if the real expertise for licking the English
language into printable shape may make its final home in Okhla rather
than in Oxford, in Bangalore and Chennai rather than in Birmingham.
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