Perils of the pulp tradeIt‚s a paradox which requires some investigation and explanation. On the one hand contemporary India is the world‚s largest market for the printed word. On the other the country‚s book publishing industry has been on oxygen for years, if not decades. Hope sprang in every breast with the arrival on Indian shores of the UK-based Penguin Books almost two decades ago. But it proved to be a false dawn for this perennially beleaguered industry. The parent company in Britain ceded a majority equity share in the Indian company to the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazaar Patrika group which at best, is a big fish in a very small eastern region pond, which is perhaps why Penguin India has exhibited none of the dynamism and business development savvy of its British parent. Nor is the book publishing industry entirely to be blamed. The book retail trade has been taken over by crass merchants who exhibit an overwhelming preference for pulp fiction and high price titles published abroad on which they earn high unit commissions. The big money is in retailing educational textbooks. But even in this segment organised sector retailers face competition from down-market regional and local language publishers who thanks to political patronage, have cornered dominant slices of the education books market.Against this backdrop of pusillanimous marketing by non-education book publishers and grudging promotion by retailers, the largest selling title in Indian history is ‚ surprise, surprise ‚ You Can Win, a self-development book authored by business management guru Shiv Khera which has been reprinted 29 times (by Macmillan India) and has sold over 550,000 copies ‚ a number far ahead of Arundhati Roy‚s God of Small Things (80,000). But an important reason why books sell in larger numbers abroad even in small countries, is because of orders from the large number of public libraries. That‚s a rare institutional species of which India‚s omniscient central planners seem blissfully unaware.Not so elementary It‚s reflective of the bankruptcy of the apex level management of the chocolate manufacturing major Cadbury India, that its comeback advertising campaign currently being aired on prime-time television features the somewhat over-flogged warhorse Amitabh Bachchan endorsing the company‚s brand. Following a spate of reports of live worms being discovered late last year in its pricey chocolates which command an estimated 66 percent of the national market, instead of devising a sensitive ad campaign to reassure the public that it has taken new and adequate fail-safe precautions to prevent a recurrence of worms infestation of its brands mainly patronised by vulnerable children, the Cadbury management has ill-advisedly chosen the over-exposed Big B to plug its prime Cadbury‚s Dairy Milk brand.Ill-advisedly because given that Bachchan is currently endorsing about a dozen brands in the national media, his credibility is wearing thin. Among the brands currently being endorsed by the Big B on national television are Reid & Taylor, Parker Pens, Dabur, Maruti Versa, Nerolac Paints, ICICI Bank, Lomani perfume, Sahara City Homes and the AIDS/ pulse polio campaigns. Consequently…
