A lasting love affair with books and children
It sounds like a fairytale but it’s really just a publishing house on a mission
Banaswadi, between Outer Ring Road and Cox
Town, is quintessential semi-suburban Bengaluru, with the mandatory vegetable
stalls, fish shops, bakeries and a Kingfisher pub. It is neither the city
centre proper nor part of any planned satellite township on its outskirts, and
it most definitely doesn’t look like a hub for Indian children’s publishing.
But this happens to be
where the headquarters of Pratham Books is located, in a lovely bright office
on the third floor of a somewhat nondescript pink building.
They’ve hit the news recently
for being nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award—worth
five million Swedish kronor (₹3.6 crore) and considered the Nobel Prize for
children’s literature—and in April they got an astonishing $3.6 million (₹26
crore) grant from Google.org to develop their path-breaking open-source
platform, StoryWeaver.
Currently, StoryWeaver
offers stories for kids in 67 languages, both Indian and foreign, which have so
far been read about one million times. As I logged on to the online platform, I
even found several surprisingly fun translations of Indian stories in my own
obscure tongue, Swedish. And all of it can be accessed for free.
I soon learn that
Pratham Books’ target of putting ‘a book in every child’s hand’ means exactly
that: they want to reach hundreds of millions of children in India and offer at
least 20,000 titles. Although it sounds like a too-good-tobe-true fairytale, I
quickly discover that theirs is an efficiently managed, visionary,
not-for-profit publishing house staffed by hard-working and competent
professionals.
Gratis online access
In the foyer, books hang
from the ceiling by way of a surreal decoration over a couple of work stations.
I’m led into a conference room that has cheerful yellow walls with scripts of
several Indian languages painted on them. Most of the editorial staff, the
chairperson, Suzanne Singh, and one of the founders, Ashok Kamath, join in for
a chat.
Kamath explains why he
started Pratham in 2004 with Rohini Nilekani, who is also a Pratham Books
author, and Rekha Menon: “Many of us had already worked in the non-profit
sector, bringing reading skills to children at the bottom of the pyramid, but
we saw that there was a big need for reading material that could be priced as
cheap as ₹2.”
To make printed books
affordable, they introduced the concept of truly low-cost publishing through
their colourful ‘story card’—a single A4 or A3 page, printed on thick, durable
paper, which can be folded so that it becomes a simple picture book. Today, 13
years on, these are still as cheap as ₹4 per copy, and such ‘story cards’ have, for
example, been distributed to over 70,000 pre-schools in Bihar.
Kamath continues, “Many
of our authors and illustrators work with us at low cost because they believe
in the mission. The second thing is that we decided to build our work around
the idea that multiple languages result in larger market volumes. Bestsellers
in India at that time meant 2,000 to 3,000 copies, but we were routinely
printing 10,000 to 15,000 copies and so were able to achieve an economy of
scale.”
The numbers talk
Today, Pratham Books
prints an average of a million hard copies of their books per year, and offers
3,100 downloadable titles on their StoryWeaver platform. According to their own
research, each printed book they put out is read seven times on average, which
means that the million copies they print have a seven million strong
readership.
While they sell in bulk
to institutions and organisations, they also crowdfund through their
Donate-a-Book platform. (The average price of their printed books is ₹35,
so a donation of ₹1,000 would translate into a classroom set of
about 30 books.)
And they, of course,
allow gratis online access—so if you have no children’s library nearby, you
simply log on to the StoryWeaver platform to read in a range of languages.
Their online library has 14,000 registered users, but since they also give
access without registration, another one lakh unique unknown visitors browse for
stories to read.
Around 3,000 volunteers
participate in their annual ‘One Day, One Story’ reading championship, which
reaches tens of thousands of kids, the biggest programme they coordinate.
While listening to them
rattling off
Source | The Hindu | 27 June 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Lecture | ACTREC - BOSLA Annual lecture series (125th birth anniversary of father
of library science, Padmashree Dr. S. R. Ranganathan) on Saturday, 12th August 2017 at
Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC),
Kharghar, Navi Mumbai. (Theme |
'MakerSpace')
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