The Hindu Business Line : Penguin forays into business books genre

MARKING its foray into the genre of business books, publisher Penguin India has launched an imprint called Portfolio which is targeted at practising managers.

"There's an enormous appetite in India for books about business," said Mr John Makinson, Chairman and Chief Executive, Penguin Group. The imprint was launched in the US 2-3 years ago, and "seems to be relevant to the market in India," he said, speaking to Business Line. Penguin will publish books sourced from other Penguin territories but the main focus will be on Indian books for the Indian market. There are about 30-35 titles lined up, on business management, successes and failures.

Mr Makinson said the company is outsourcing the digitisation of its content to India. Pearson's investment in this initiative amounts to $35 million every year, he said. Half goes into technology support and development for Pearson in general while the rest is used to develop the Pearson Education business, particularly for the US. The total investment in India is a bit difficult to aggregate as the company considers it business by business, he added.

Another important initiative is its recent foray into publishing regional language titles in Penguin. "India is too complex a culture to be defined by single-language publishing," said Mr Makinson, adding that this was the first country in which Penguin published in languages other than English. This year, the company will publish a few titles in Malayalam, marking its entry into South Indian languages, he said, adding that Penguin would publish 70 regional language books in total. The books are a combination of old, new and translations.

Penguin is also pushing distribution of Indian authors' books abroad, he said. At Rs 50 crore, Penguin India's contribution to the publisher's worldwide revenue of £1 billion is small (partly because book prices in the country are very low) but then, "Pearson is also making money in India," he said.

Mr Makinson said Internet initiatives such as e-books, Web rentals, sales, subscriptions and print-on-demand books are a very important part of Penguin's future.

As for piracy, a major bugbear, Mr Subroto Mozumdar, President, Pearson Education, said the Government has been quite supportive of late. However, India "is the best situation when compared to the rest of the continent," he said.