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Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's picture book publisher headquartered in Bangalore, India, with a mission to see 'a book in every child's hand'. Pratham Books has been addressing the book famine in India and by extension the world through its low-cost, high-volume, multilingual publishing since 2004. But upon realizing the limitations of print, they moved towards something more audacious – adopting an open licence to create an innovative digital platform, StoryWeaver, that not only housed Pratham Books' titles but empowered users to use, adapt, download, and translate books as they saw fit to address the gaps in their own spheres and help put books in children's hands. In just seven years, StoryWeaver has grown 50 times in size and scope, from a repository of 800 books in 24 languages to over 45 000 books in 314 languages. By disrupting traditional publishing models, Pratham Books' StoryWeaver has shown us what the future of publishing and reading looks like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A whirlwind historical tour of the trade publishing (in English) landscape in India from the start of printing down to the present day, 75 years after Independence. The piece attempts to be a capsule history surveying the evolution of the trade book market through the multiple perspectives of authors, booksellers, genres, publishers, and market data. This is intended primarily as a quick introduction to the beginner and practitioner alike and is not intended to be an exhaustive narrative either by chronology or by genre or market information. It is a quick one-stop reference point for those who would like to see when and how the foundations for trade publishing were late, the key historical imperatives, early writing movements, the earliest booksellers, the beginnings of a formalized and sustained market through imports and distribution, and looks at the evolution of local Indian English publishing and how that has matured into a significant industry; and concludes by taking stock of current market realities and assays forward initiatives needed to reach the next level of stable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]