IPP Star has taken advantage of registering at the FBF Special Edition for several reasons. Above all, we have covered the fair for the past twenty-five years in our monthly Indian Printer and Publisher trying to report on the Indian publishing and printing and services industry’s progress. Most often, we have done this in person, and twice we took stands with and on behalf of Indian printers to help them export book printing under a loose imprint called the ‘Indian Print Exporter Forum.’ One year, we also successfully helped the German Book Office organizer a speed dating event for Indian printers to meet with global publishers.
This time IPP Star and I are also taking part in the rights platform as a rights trader for a wonderful series of ten humorous and hardboiled crime books that take place in New Orleans, Louisiana in the United States, written by Tony Dunbar. This genre, noire, I have always admired thinking that the reality of our cities and political life can only be accurately described in fiction. And one that I think is needed to describe the Indian reality. I hope to help sell the translation rights to nine out of the ten Dunbar books to the Scandinavians who excel in this genre and also to publishers of Malayalam, Bengali, and Hindi fiction and perhaps other languages. The theatrical or video rights to Dunbar’s works are also available.
IPPStar’s book publishing & production in Indiia & Bangladesh research
My last mission is to project and perhaps find further support for IPPStar’s on the ground research project on the Book publishing and printing industry in Indian and Bangladesh that we completed in 2019. This is a comprehensive project with a large sample of face-to-face interviews, emphasizing education, textbooks, and trade publishing in local languages. We believe that this work projects a little-understood scale by the industry because it is supported and validated by our knowledge of the entire production of the book printers in these two countries.
Remarkably when the daily papers are full of Bangladesh catching up and even overtaking India on several economic and social indicators, this comes as no surprise to us since our Book Publishing and Production research of the two countries indicated just that. One of our findings, that we also tried to share at the Jaipur BookMark this year, was precisely that – Bangladesh produces and consumes 1.5 times the school (K to 12) textbooks than India.
We are waiting for the Indian industry and its fragmented book publishing and printing sectors to wake up to the need for real and inclusive research of all types of books and in all languages. Right now the industry is mostly dazzled by its own breast-beating and some fancy charts and diagrams based on limited samples that have ignored a substantial part of the Indian publishing pyramid. For further information please contact Purva Dwivedi, data analyst and director at IPP Star.
