Reading in ... India

       The peculiar business that is book publishing is, of course, peculiar worldwide -- hence it's not just in the US/UK/etc. that one can find a headline such as The reading conundrum: Is the books business booming or dying ? -- as Saudamini Jain explores the Indian situation, in the Hindustan Times.
       Mixed signals indeed:

In the late 1970s, the average book sold around 2,000 copies, writes veteran publisher Ashok Chopra in his memoir A Scrapbook of Memories. This, he says, is roughly true even of today, four decades later.

       Indeed, apparently:

Most successful books sell not more than 3,000 copies in India. This is a low number for anywhere in the world -- especially considering the size of the Indian middle-class

       I'm not sure their sense of the Indian situation versus that abroad is correct:

The big failure of Indian publishing, [Thomas Abraham, managing director at Hachette India] says is that "We, as an industry, have failed to do anything collectively to build the reading habit. We have done nothing to propagate serious reading. In the West, they have a designated Reading Day when the government and publishers come together. In Chicago, for instance, everyone on that one day will read Anna Karenina or whatever. You need to create something on TV, like Oprah Winfrey does with her Book Club. We have nothing."

       Much as I like to imagine all of Chicago walking around with their heads buried in Anna Karenina ("or whatever" ...), well .....