nilanjana s roy

Category: Indian publishing

  • Speaking Volumes: Bookshoppery

    (I’d written most of this column when I sent an idle tweet out, asking people to name their favourite bookshops. The response went on for the next two days: below the column, some favourite tweets. Thank you all for crowdsourcing this! ) Published in the Business Standard, May 20, 2013   Bookshops that aren’t really […]

  • The furore over 2(m) and parallel imports

    The problem with the debate over parallel imports is that it has, inevitably, pitted the interests of readers, students and academics against the interests of authors, publishers, and well, readers again. As someone who might write books at some point, and who’s worked in the publishing industry, I was very glad to hear that the […]

  • Speaking Volumes: Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim

    (Published in the Business Standard, May 31, 2011)Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, […]

  • Parallel imports (3): From the publishing industry

    (The debate over parallel imports is a matter of public interest–it affects readers, writers and the publishing industry. This is why the publishing industry thinks the 2m amendment will be bad for business–copyright lawyers have had a very different perspective. To follow the debate, read back on Divya Dubey’s blog: here, here, here and here. […]

  • Parallel imports (2): Publishing and the 2(m) amendment

    (This was a follow-up to the blog post on parallel imports, below; carried in the Business Standard, February 19th. Thomas Abraham and Prof Shamnad Basheer continue the debate over at Divya Dubey’s blog, in considerable depth.)Call this the war of the slogans. On one side, copyright lawyers and the Ministry of Human Resource Development offer […]

  • Parallel imports: what readers should know

    Just a quick summary of the intense debates around the possibility of opening up the Indian publishing market to “parallel imports”. This is in many ways a very technical issue; the proposed amendments to the Indian Copyright laws would allow parallel imports of books in India, and would effectively change the way publishers in the […]

  • The BS column: Damning the Oriental scene

    “Reading literature and having a damn good time had become quietly but decidedly uncoupled,” writes Lev Grossman in an essay on the rise of the trashy hybrid novel. He could have been writing about India, where the rise of imitation pulp fiction—the Third World version of Eric Segal, not even the Third World version of […]

  • The Business Standard column: Copyright, copywrong?

    (Published in the Business Standard, June 1, 2010)The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out. Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will […]

  • Pradipta Sarkar’s delectable post on ‘How not to impress a publisher’. Required reading for anyone with a manuscript in hand and a gun in his pocket.

  • Publishing in India

    (Published in Le Monde, March 2007) Just over a century after Gutenberg invented movable type, a Jesuit ship stopped off the port of Goa on the Indian coast for provisions. Among its human cargo was a printer; listed on the bill was a printing press intended for Abyssinia. The Portuguese priests of Goa hijacked both […]