Regional Language Books Industry - Need To Embrace Technology

Clipping from newspaper talking about problems faced by physical book industry

Today's newspaper carried an article underlining the fact that in general the tendency to purchase books is reducing.

True it is.

Landscape is changed in last several years. There are changes at social, behavioral, technical and mental levels. And book industry, at least regional book industry, hasn't changed much.

Social:

Number of nuclear families has gone up. They have shifted to smaller places. This means lesser space available for books. People are also engaging in lot more varied activities, which were not available in the past - lot of newer sports, adventure sports, various hobbies, parties, movies, get-togethers and what not. The extent of all such activities was considerably lower say about 20 years back. Reading books was a favorite activity during free time and at times at the cost of studies/work 😉

Behavioral:

People are commuting a lot. Spending more time on the move resulting into lesser time to sit and read. At the same time, they have time at hand while on the move, which gets consumed by easily accessible mobile phones and the internet. Pulling out a physical book on a commute is difficult specially when you have an easy option of mobile phone.

Technical:

Access to fast and cheap internet, mobile phones, ease of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Whatsapp etc has added to the problems that physical books are facing. Additionally, technology has enabled the population at large to be content creator rather just passive consumer (photos becoming a most favored way to content creation). Technology has also affected the attention span negatively. Usually books need more attention span than a FB feed item or posting a quick snap on Snapchat. Rise of kindle and other book reading apps has also their own readers, who used to be readers of physical books. The concept of carrying several books on a small device either kindle or on your mobile phone and read them at will has huge appeal and many readers from younger age groups are embracing this concept.

Mental:

People are getting used to instant gratification in terms of short stories, tweets etc and do not want to keep track of the longer plots which books carry. This partly is driven by technology as well as time pressures, resulting in driving away the reader from physical books.

Why is this problem faced by regional language books only?

This has to do with the rise and need of English as a primary language in the professional world, which is difficult to avoid. Kids getting into english medium schools instead of regional languages, resulting into lesser audience for regional books. 

So isn't there a way out?

There could be. Regional book publishers need to embrace the technology and start publishing books in digital formats as well. There is a good chunk of readers who still prefer physical books for their habitual reasons, but it would change in next 10 to 20 years as demographics change. Authors need to get on to various digital platforms and be microbloggers on FB , Twitter etc. Books need to get published in audio formats which could be easier for several folks who travel using trains, metro etc.

I feel physical book publishings could be dead in another 50 years and there is no point in cribbing about it. The readers are shifting heavily to digital media and that is bound to grow even further.

Essentially, book industry needs to stop seeing itself as physical book industry only and need to embrace other formats as well.