Penguin in many bhashas

From The Bookseller:
“Penguin is stepping up its attack on the growing Indian market with a local language program, the first non-English publishing from the 70-year-old house.
Penguin India will publish four Hindi titles in April, including Hamara Hissa, an anthology of contemporary Hindi stories edited by Arun Prakash, and Shakuntala: The Play of Memory (Shakuntala: Smriti Jaal) by Namita Gokhale.
It will begin publishing in Marathi and Malayalam later this year, and is planning 25 titles in each of the three languages this year with similar output for the next two to three years. It plans to move into more Indian languages from 2006, and claims it is the first U.K. publisher to publish in regional Indian languages.”

It’s going to be a fascinating experiment: there’s no such thing as a “regional language market”, given that every local language has its own, very quirky publishing map in India, so Penguin will have to bear the cost of making mistakes. And mistakes will be inevitable in the early stages. On the other hand, this could actually expand readership for some writers in English, if they’re translated into local languages, and it could tap potential readers in small towns far better than current efforts. This should be fun to watch, especially if some of the other publishing houses in India–HarperCollins, Roli, Picador–follow in Penguin’s footsteps.