Giving e-cues to the book lovers

The world is flat, Thomas Friedman said famously, and innovators like Brij Singh are proving this through their work and the choices they make in life.
Singh, an IIT Roorkee graduate who spent 10 years in Silicon Valley, US, as a serial entrepreneur, moved to Bangalore recently and founded Apptility – a web services company that counts revolutionising e-publishing among its many goals.

Through Fliplog, one of its flagship products, Apptility and Singh aim to “reinvent books for the digital generation”. “Traditional books and content formats are getting disrupted with the ongoing digital revolution, and with Fliplog, we want to be at the leading edge of this transformation,” says Singh.
The company uses the Fliplog platform to create e-books that are available for download on the iPad and iPhone – two gadgets that Singh is an unabashed fan of. He also believes the iPad has an important role to play in India. “It will be instrumental in innovation leapfrogging and will give a new starting line to Indian designers.”

He believes the iPad has set a new benchmark because “Bangalore-based startups can now bring out amazing products as the starting point is the same for everyone in the world”.

When Netscape started life in the US as the first web browser, says Singh, the Internet was unheard of in India. Today, technology innovations reach all corners of an increasingly flatter world in no time at all.

Apptility has kicked off its e-publishing project by tying up with Indian publishers Tulika and Pratham Books to transform some of their popular children’s titles, such as Tulika’s Ekki Dokki and Pratham’s Annual Haircut Day, into e-books.  It also has plans of creating ‘from scratch’ e-books for the iPad and other tablet devices. The start-up has published about 20 books, including nine in the children’s category, within a few months of launching Fliplog, and there are many more in the queue.

Marrying the multi-lingual variety available in Indian children’s books with iPad technology has been one of the high points. If you download one of the multilingual books, Tulika’s The Runaway Peppercorn, for instance, users get a page-by-page multilingual audio and can switch between a Hindi/English version and a Tamil/English version. This is especially useful for children growing up in multi-lingual households  or ones in which parents find it difficult to introduce kids to vernacular languages.

The coming together of Apptility and Indian publishers willing to let companies like them digitalise their books was largely serendipitous. Pratham Books licences its content under open, Creative Commons licenses that allow Apptility, and anyone else, to use them without requiring negotiations, provided the terms of the licence are followed, says Gautam John of Bangalore-based Pratham Books. “We hope Brij and other organisations will reuse this content in ways that will continue to surprise us,” says John.

How would the iPad-Fliplog combo compare with dedicated e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle? “Fliplog on iPad is going to serve the special needs of publishers and authors while for mass distribution, publishers will continue to use Amazon Kindle. In many cases, publishers/authors may want to add enhanced features — videos, audio interviews, animation and games — and Fliplog can design these enhanced books,” says Singh.

Two years ago, the Singh family moved back to Bangalore after living abroad for more than 10 years. “We had to make a few adjustments but not many,” says Singh, who finds Bangalore a friendly city for newcomers and, with “great weather and an educated, cosmopolitan crowd”, not unlike the Bay Area.
His advice to NRIs settling here? “Bangalore is growing at a crazy speed. Cultures don’t change as fast as businesses, so exhale slowly,” he smiles.