Print vs Digital
“There is a lot of value in a printed book. It is cheap,
you can travel with it, you don’t have to plug it in, and you know that it will
still be around two centuries later because a book is a book. It works. Digital
is cheaper, but you don’t know where it is after you have read it; you cannot
lend it to friends, and in one century it will probably be lost. An e-book is
not going to revolutionise the market,” says Nourry, who was in Delhi for the
10th anniversary of Hachette India. The €2.2-billion Hachette Livre, which
ranks behind Pearson and Penguin Random House in the global sweepstakes,
publishes 17,000 titles every year in 10 languages.
However, the retail dimension is as key as copyright
issues, as publishing a book is not every expensive. But book publishers need
book stores and outlets and people who read, and that’s why protection of
retail is key for the future of the business, points out Nourry. “Innovation is
the big challenge because the world we live in will be different from the world
we will be in 20 years from now; today access to the internet is from a keyboard,
in five years’ time it will be voice-activated. What impact it will have on our
business, I don’t know, but there will be one, so we have to be more innovative
than we have been in the last 50 years,” he says.
Regards
Prof. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
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