Savvier readers mean ebooks turning bestsellers

While bookstores are reducing shelf space for hardbacks and paperbacks to stock more video games, toys, stationery and gadgets, electronic books, or ebooks, are ascending gradually.

Online shopping firms are betting big on ebooks that score over physical books due to their ease of use, low price and zero stocking needs.

Currently, ebooks comprise less than a percent of the Rs 10,000 crore book publishing industry in India, a major contrast with the US where e-books have already crossed $1 billion in annual sales.

"It is a nascent market in India. We have a tech-savvy reader base that is looking for options to buy and read books on their mobile devices,\\\" said Sameer Nigam, VP, digital, Flipkart.com, which introduced ebooks last month.

The online boom and increasing penetration of laptops, tablets and PCs is also fuelling the growing consumer interest in ebooks.

In 2011-12, the sale of personal computers increased by 16% over previous year, data by the Manufacturers Association for IT (MAIT) show.

The total sale of notebooks, desktop computers and netbooks stood at 10.8 million units in the last fiscal.

"With greater penetration of tablets and laptops, the usage of ebooks will increase,\\\" said Hemant Kohli, CEO of Bookadda.com, an online bookstore, which will launch ebooks in 2013.

"There is a shift in reading habit in favour of ebooks,\\\" said Soumya Banerjee, CEO of Attano.com, an ebookstore for educational books, adding that \\\"there will, however, remain a vast section that would continue to prefer physical books\\\".

Experts said ebooks are \\\"more than just a PDF\\\" and allow readers to not just read the content but also highlight key points, underline, search for terms, create notes, add multiple bookmarks and solve quizzes and worksheets.

"Readers can expand the font. This is not possible with physical books carrying small fonts,\\\\\\\" said Nigam.

Moreover, they often cost 15-25% less than physical books due to absence of printing, warehousing and logistics charges.

Thus from a price range of Rs 30-700 and more, firms are pushing ebooks in several categories including fiction, non-fiction and academics.

Though firms are seeing demand grow by almost 100% annually, ebooks meant for higher education including engineering and MBA are seeing more uptake. Even at the broader level, academic books constitute a major chunk of the book space, making up Rs 8,000 crore of the Rs 10,000 crore book market, as per industry data.

"Students are especially seeing convenience with ebooks. It is not always possible to carry or stock 20-30 books. Thus they have started downloading ebooks,\\\" said Kohli.

Banerjee said consumers usually prefer buying assessment ebooks, those for mathematics, workbooks, etc.

Experts predict the market for educational ebooks has the potential to scale to Rs 5,000-6,000 crore in next three years.

According to Nigam, in some years from now, nearly 50% of total books sold will be ebooks, \\\"like it is in the US and Europe".