Flipping a new page in book publishing

Badri Seshadri is passionate about education. He has definite and strong views on the education system and educational institutions.

The institutions, he says, must inculcate the correct value system in students and must not confine themselves to merely teaching the curriculum. Even the elite institutions in the country, he adds, are no match for the reputed institutions abroad, particularly in the US.

He should know. He passed out of IIT-Madras, a class topper, with a mechanical engineering degree and then went on to Cornell University in the US, for a postgraduate programme and a Ph.D in the subject. Unlike most others with similar qualifications, Badri decided to come back to India, to run a venture he had co-founded.

Even while in Cornell, he was one of the volunteers for Cricinfo, a popular Web site for cricket fans. This was in 1993, when a lot of interesting things were happening on the Internet. And, in 1996, when Cricinfo turned a commercial entity, Badri jumped at the opportunity and was one of its co-founders, running the business out of India.

We are meeting in a Café Coffee Day outlet near his office in Chennai – simply because there is a power shutdown between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. in the area where his office is located – with loud music, workers hammering away elsewhere in the building and the loud chatter of the other patrons in the café, we get talking about Badri’s journey as an entrepreneur.

New Horizon Media Pvt Ltd, of which Badri is one of the founders and his business card describes him as Publisher, is his second venture. One that he started with K. Satyanarayan, also an IIT-M alumnus and who was with him in Cricinfo, and R. Ananthkumar.

New Horizon Media is into book publishing, mainly in Tamil, a business that is highly fragmented, disorganised and which Badri sees as an outlet for his passion for education.

But, first Cricinfo. The initial years were quite difficult. It was a purely advertisement-driven revenue model. For the first three years, till 1999, Badri and the other promoter Simon King ran the business with whatever little money they could raise. Finding the going tough, they had a series of small investments in 1999, the first being about £100,000. The subsequent investors in Cricinfo included Sify, an Internet company.

Cricinfo went through a whole lot of changes from 2000 to 2003, during which time Wisden took a stake in the company and after which it was sold to ESPN, the sports television channel.

Badri says he still continued to run Cricinfo till April 2005, but by this time he found it boring and not much of a challenge. “The difficult times were actually easier for me to manage. I knew what I had to do. Here it was boring,” says Badri.

His working day was about two-three hours and apart from signing a few cheques there was pretty much nothing else to do.

Next venture

That is when Satya and he started discussing their next venture. They were sure they wanted to do something on education or knowledge. “We toyed with various ideas relating to education. Even the best institutions here did not match up to the global ones in terms of the value systems they inculcate. We gave up everything and decided to get into publishing, which was the closest to education,” says Badri.

Thus was born New Horizon Media, which publishes books in Tamil on various topics – as diverse as Six Sigma, 5S, biographies, translations of books from other languages.

The company came into being in February 2004, with the three promoters – who now own about 60-65 per cent of the company – putting in about Rs 1 crore of their funds. Rajesh Jain of Emergic Venture Capital invested in New Horizon Media in 2006, followed by Beacon India Private Equity Fund in 2008. Beacon’s holding was bought out by Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, another IIT-M alumnus.

“Our initial idea was to publish books in all knowledge areas for common readers. Think of Penguin and Rupa, in Tamil,” says Badri. New Horizon Media also got into publishing translations. New Horizon Media even brought out audio CDs of some of the books, but did not actively pursue it as the discs were easy to copy.

“We approached translations scientifically. We messed up enormously, others messed up big time. We are struggling to do a good job of it. If we publish 10 books in translation, only five actually cross the standard mark. We are slowly improving that ratio. We are trying to figure out why translation books are failing,” says Badri. Money is being spent on how to get it right and, more importantly, in building institutional memory on how translations should be done.

New Horizon Media tried publishing books in Malayalam, but quickly got out of it as the company found that market closed to outsiders. Unlike the Tamil publishing industry, where Badri says anyone can enter and bring out books, the Malayalam market is tightly controlled. The company has published a few thousand books so far. “The first couple of years, we published 50 titles, then we increased,” says Badri. The company priced the books upwards of Rs 20 initially; now they are available from Rs 40 to Rs 100. “The company is breaking even in our core business. But we are constantly investing for the next medium.” It has revenues of about Rs 6 crore.

Electronic platform

According to him, New Horizon Media is creating an electronic platform – an NHM Reader, something like a Kindle. The iOS (Apple) application has been launched and the Android version should be out anytime now. “We want to position this as the Indian language Kindle,” says Badri.

Racks in showrooms

New Horizon Media has also adopted other novel ways to sell books. One is to have racks in textile showrooms and smaller departmental stores displaying a few of its titles. The other is to have a phone dial-in facility – Dial For Books – where the caller can ask for any book published in Tamil and they will source it and deliver.

Jayachandran Textiles in Chennai, Maharaja Textiles in Thanjavur and Seematti Textiles in Kumbakonam are some of the places they have racks, small ones not occupying too much space. “That is giving us little more than 50 per cent of our revenue,” says Badri.

The problem is he cannot scale this model as others are not willing to provide space for the company to put up racks.

On the NHM reader model, Badri says the future is still uncertain. There are three possibilities. One, that model collapses and New Horizon Media goes back to selling books through bookstores. Two, it generates significant revenues that NHM becomes a completely different company, that print will become a small part of the overall business. Three, “the whole business is so attractive to somebody else, they will come and buy us out,” Will they sell? “We are open to that also,” replies Badri.

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