Monday 17 December 2012
Amazon’s New India Kindle Store
People in India already had access to Kindle via costly imports, but now the Kindle and ebook market just exploded in potential with the recent release of India’s Kindle Store. With over one billion people and a bourgeoning middle class, the potential market for ebooks just increased very dramatically.Granted, not all one billion people have the means to purchase and Amazon Kindle. The bare-bones version costs 6,999 rupees (as of writing, that’s equivalent to $126.38 American dollars) and they can be purchased at Croma stores across India. While for most of the population this tablet is still prohibitively expensive, for an ever-increasing group of people this is definitely a gadget that not only falls into their price-range but is also very covetable. For Indians that already have a Kindle, or if they wish to buy one of the more expensive imports such as Kindle Touch 3G, they can still access the recently opened Indian Kindle store on those devices.
Amazon has found a very good population in which to expand their Kindle and ebooks services. The middle and upper classes of India are very literate and fluent in multiple languages, including English (in fact, more people speak English in India than they do in America). Many people are voracious readers. This is a huge boon for Indian authors and publishers – if you are one of our Indian customers reading this blog, start putting your own ebooks onto the Indian store in whichever language you feel most comfortable publishing in, jaldi se! This is a great opportunity to be ahead of the curve and stake your claim in the new world of e-readers and get some easy and evergreen revenue. Indian authors and publishers will now start receiving royalty payments in rupees, which is very convenient for within India. The market potential is enormous and now is the time to beat the pack!
If you live in a country outside of India but happen to know one of the many languages found in India now would be a GREAT time to publish works in these other languages. It’s still in the early days, but your ebook will be readily available to the constant influx of new customers whose mother tongue is not English (though to reiterate, publishing more ebooks in English is fine because so many people speak perfectly good English…sometimes even better English….than what is spoken in predominately English-speaking countries) and it will maximize your income potential. If you want to write in Devanagari, Tamil, Nastaliq, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, or one of the other major Indian scripts, please refer to Amazon’s support team for help concerning publishing in these scripts.One thing that will be very interesting to see though is how the Indian government will navigate this unchartered territory. India is the world’s largest democracy, and though freedom of expression is enshrined in their constitution, the government has been known to occasionally censor or ban books in an effort to keep “communal harmony” (that is in itself an interesting topic, but one not meant for this blog). Some of these banned books are available on Amazon’s International Kindle Store, and it remains yet to be seen if they can be published digitally on Amazon’s Indian store. If not, people in India with Kindles should still be able to access banned books via the international store…there is going to be some interesting maneuvering from distributors and/or politicians happening in the near future.
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