The Indian publishing industry is one of the most prominent publishing industries across the globe. The number of books published throughout the year span across multiple Indian languages, formal and informal sectors, diverse genres, all amounting to a long list which puts the Indian publishing industry at the second spot in the world (English publications) with approximately 19,000 publishing houses across the country publishing approximately 90,000 titles per year according to 2020-21 stats (Mallaya, 2016).
India's tremendous diversity reflected in its languages and varied modes of cultural expression, is also mirrored in its publishing industry. The spectrum of publishing activity ranges from large multinational publishing houses publishing in mainstream languages in many formats to small indies with a specialized linguistic or ideological focus.
According to EY India (EY India, 2021) The 2019 estimates put the value of the Indian industry to approximately INR 50,000 crores, with its potential estimated at INR 80,000 crores by 2024. With a growth rate of 20.4 percent, compounded annually between 2012 and 2015, India’s print book industry is estimated to be worth INR 26,060 crore. The new figures replace the older and unverifiable ones with more reliable annually compounded figures worth INR 14,000 crore, at a growth rate of 15 percent. The EIBF International Bookselling Markets Report 2023 (EIBF Report, 2024) affirms that India is the sixth-largest book market in the world, and currently the second-largest market for books in English, right behind the United States. It also figures India’s current growth rate at 7%.
Print publishing has seen ups and downs over the past years. From a bird's eye view, print publishing seems to have been shaken by the overwhelming growth of e-books, with Kindles and other devices cementing their spaces in the market, exploiting the changing attitudes towards digital mediums. The obituary for print turned out to be premature as we see a constant and steady rise in the titles physically published every year. The industry however faces multiple other major issues such as piracy and the decreasing ‘bibliodiversity’, as the majority of Indians largely read less for entertainment purposes and more for utilitarian purposes.
During the mid to late-2010s, the total ebook sales in India, recorded by the English-language trade publishers, were around 2 percent of their total sales revenue. This marked the death of the print-versus-ebook debate for the decade, leaving us with ample evidence for the coexistence of the print and digital formats in a hybrid publishing model. These numbers have, however, seen significant fluctuations ever since, with the share of e-books seeing an expected boom due to multiple factors (Mallaya, 2016).
Pre-Covid, e-reading devices didn't find too many buyers in India, according to the Nielsen book report. However, during the pandemic, in the first period of the lockdown in 2020, the scenario changed as Amazon ebooks sales saw a significant boom. The big publishing houses even speculated doubled ebook sales during that time. Even if e-book sales had doubled, they contributed very little to revenue, coping up with the losses incurred during the first four months of lockdown in 2020 (Majumdar, 2022).
According to a 2007 publication by the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) (Majumdar, 2022) almost 80% of books published in India were in Indian languages. A similar survey by FIP in 2004 (British Council, 2020-2021) had shown similar statistics of 18 Indian languages split up in a way that together Hindi (26 percent) and English (23 percent) made up nearly half of it. The other top Indian languages in which books were published were Tamil (9 percent), Bengali (7 percent), Marathi (7 percent) and Malayalam (4 percent). These figures only indicate the number of titles published and not per-capita book production.
A decade on, observation of these industries reveal a similar composition, regardless of the growth in the actual number of titles published in many languages. The table below shows comparative statistics—identical, even a decade apart—with the percentage split of languages and number of titles (with ISBN numbers), published in 2004 and 2013 (British Council, 2020-2021).
The total number of new books published in India around the year approximates to 90,000 titles in 24 languages, including English. The per capita number of book titles published in India is around 8 per 100,000 population. The table below (British Council, 2020-2021) shows the number of titles per capita published in regional languages across the country.
The educational books sector, which forms 70 percent of the book market in India, is the bulwark for the publishing industry. Out of the 9,037 publishers identified in the Nielsen report, 8,107 publish books for schools, colleges and higher educational institutions with the rest 930 indulging in trade publishing. The school-books market in 2013–14 was worth INR 18,600 crore, and the market for books for higher education was valued at INR 5,600 crore and the trade books market was valued at INR 1,860 crore in the same period (Mangala, 2022). According to EY India’s (EY India, 2022) report titled ‘Value proposition of Indian publishing,’ the dominance of educational and academic publishing, forming the non-trade segment of the market, was as high as 95% of the total market in 2019, an anomaly compared to the other publishing industries in the international market.