The Hindu Business Line : Moving from dotcom to publishing

AFTER his success with dotcom, Mr Badri Seshadri, one of the promoters of CricInfo.com — a cricket portal that merged with UK-based Wisden Online — has turned to publishing Tamil books.

"We want to provide readers knowledge-oriented Tamil books," says Mr Seshadri, Publisher, New Horizon Media Ltd, which owns Kizhakku Pathippakam, which publishes the books.

The company, which has published 50 titles, hopes to gross Rs 40 lakh in the first year of operations ending March 31, he said.

Tamil book publishing is estimated at about Rs 15 crore a year with 500 publishers - 300 publish at least five titles in a year - bring out about 7,500 titles, annually. The industry is growing at 10 per cent a year.

Some of the subjects include general-purpose books such as cookery, religion and magazines - best sellers are gemmology, astrology and nameology. The market, however, excludes government purchase of Tamil books for the State libraries, he said.

"We want to raise the level of knowledge creation and dissemination of a typical Indian language society to the level of the English society. We love quality books, and want to give Tamil readers knowledge-oriented books," says Mr Seshadri, an alumnus of IIT Madras.

Mr K. Satyanarayanan, Director, New Horizon Media, said there is a huge market for quality Tamil books, and especially in rural areas.

Kizhakku Pathipakkam is reaching rural areas through exhibitions that are conducted in major districts, he said.

Kizhakku Pathipakkam's best sellers include `Alla Allap Panam' (a book on stock market), biography of Mr Dhirubhai Ambani and `Dollar Desam'.

It also published biographies on Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Virender Sehwag, he said.

"Many publishers do not even pay royalties to their authors — some are bank employees and teachers. However, we pay our authors up-front royalty equivalent to 1,000 copies. This is irrespective of how well the book sells. The authors also get 10 per cent of book's value as royalty," he said.

The company plans to create audio books, and make them available in the form of cassettes, CDs and MP3 downloadable files.

It also plans to create an encyclopaedia and dictionary in Tamil, and making the content available in printed book, in CD and over the Net, he said.

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