Ok, Shyam, here goes the text:
'Heard' any good books lately?
Will audio books eventually hit the jackpot in India? Companies big and
small are pushing this new genre, hoping that multi-taskers will listen to
everything from mafia tales and management manifestos to religious
recordings and regional literature. But finding the right voices can be
tricky.
By Margot Cohen | Grist Media - Tue 24 Sep, 2013....Recommend60Tweet0.....
First they recorded four chapters. Then they scrapped them. They chose
another narrator, and headed back to the studio. Same story. The delivery
was dullsville - almost as bad as the drone of an e-learning manual.
It was an ominous start for the audio version of The Immortals of Meluha,
the best-selling novel by Amish Tripathi that kicked off a trilogy based on
the life of Shiva. But the young founders of Reado, a Delhi-based firm that
specializes in audio books, didn't give up. On their third try, they found
Rashid Raza, a voiceover artist known for his work at NDTV. His brisk pace
and obvious relish in words like "barbarians" and "scum" put the project
back on track.
Reado's 33-year-old CEO, Sumit Suneja, now deems Immortals his favourite
title of the 110 audio books that his firm has released since entering the
market four years ago. Hoping to trade on the author's popularity, Reado is
now showcasing Tripathi's Oath of the Vayuputras on its website and plans to
erect giant cardboard cut-outs of the cover in local airports over the next
few months.
The sample audio clip thunders, "Did you really believe that a random,
untested foreigner would arrive at the right answer for the most important
question of this age?"
Reado has not always been able to catch mistakes before they exploded on the
market.
Earlier this year, for example, Suneja says the company was hit by
complaints about the audio version of Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the
Mumbai Mafia by S. Hussain Zaidi. While some vendors are still selling it
online, Reado moved to withdraw the product from brick-and-mortar stores in
April and even refunded money to more than 70 customers. (There's no word on
whether fugitive mobster Dawood Ibrahim obtained a copy.)
What was wrong with it? "It was horrible," Suneja says. "We were hell-bent
on releasing it at the World Book Fair, and we didn't use our quality
checks." His 24-year-old brother, Siddharth Suneja, now in charge of sales
and operations, says that Reado has already recorded a second version and
will introduce it shortly.
Reado also decided on a second take for Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish, Rashmi
Bansal's account of IIM Ahmedabad graduates-turned-entrepreneurs. A mere 300
copies of the original version were shipped in 2010 before the company
realized the audio book was too boring and hired a new voiceover artist.
Unfortunately, a strange blend of elevator music still tinkles behind the
narration.
Reado's sensitivity to criticism points to a broader dilemma in the audio
book business. Many Indian consumers have never even heard of audio books.
For those aware of their existence, this is still a brand new genre. Just
one or two bad experiences with an irritating audio book could wreck their
interest in the whole category for years to come.
That, in turn, might squash prospects for a flourishing market. In the US,
for example, audio book revenues have topped US $1.2 billion annually, with
more than 13,000 titles released in 2012 alone.
In India's publishing world, audio books occupy a tiny niche so far. Market
value and total sales are difficult to assess. Some companies getting into
the game confess that they are struggling to recover production costs.
Others, such as Tamil audio book producer New Horizon Media in Chennai, have
virtually abandoned new releases due to economic difficulties. Piracy also
threatens to ruin the party. But with major players like Amazon.in and
Flipkart suddenly making thousands of overseas and domestic audio books
available to curious shoppers, some optimism is brewing.
The key challenge will be to bring prices down. That should get easier,
given the advances in digital download technology. Instead of purchasing
CDs, more consumers are expected to download files onto smartphones. For
now, however, many buyers prefer the physical disk and its relatively fancy
packaging.
In the corporate sector, for example, some firms would scoop up 20 or 30
copies of the same management tome at one go and distribute them to
employees, or to guests as gifts, according to salesmen at Reliance TimeOut,
the books and music outlet that is shutting shop. Corporate commuters are a
prime target for firms like Reado.
To capture more eyes and ears, Reado also plans to place iPads in 60
bookshops in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and elsewhere in India to serve as a
"jukebox" that allows customers to sample audio clips before proceeding to
the cashier.
"A lot of the audio books we sell are priced above Rs 1,000," says Abilash
R, co-founder of the Bangalore-based audiobookindia.com, a website that
offers about Rs 2,000 audio book titles and sold more than 20,000 copies in
2012. Prices offered by the Bangalore-based company BooksTALK are more
modest, with its latest English-language releases running from Rs 199 to Rs
699. They also sell Kannada audio books for Rs 125.
But Tamil titles formerly produced by New Horizon Media run a steep US $12
on Audibles.com, partly because the US company extracts a fee for its
platform. Sales "have been very slow," says New Horizon's director, K.
Satyanarayan. After putting out a broad range of biographies, history,
business books, and short story collections from 2006 to 2010, the company
has put aside any new releases until it finishes developing a download
application to go along with its new e-book reader.
Reado, for one, is counting on hitting the jackpot eventually. Suneja points
to Rs 1.5 crore in revenues racked up in the last fiscal year (April 2012 to
March 2013) and projects crossing the 2.5 crore mark in the coming fiscal
year. The company says that it sold 95,000 audio books in 2012.
In these early years of trial and error, everyone is still trying to find
the best way to grab the ear of the listener.
That holds true for regional languages as well as English. When Ranjon
Ghoshal and his wife Sangeeta Ghoshal were invited two years ago to record
two young adult novels in Bengali, they debated how to approach the
microphone. "We were trying to find out what pace would make them most
comfortable," explains Ghoshal, a flamboyant Bangalore-based actor, director
and poet who likes to challenge convention by dying his beard turquoise and
purple. "If it was too slow, they would lose interest. If it was fast, they
would not grasp the story. Do we become very colloquial, or very bookish, or
somewhere in between?"
They recorded for booksTALK, a Bangalore firm established in 2011 that now
carries 32 titles. "What you need is a certain rhythm that sets in, almost
on a subconscious level," says booksTALK co-founder Jai Zende. "The text and
the voice rhythm need to be in harmony."
He, too, had difficulty zeroing in on suitable talent. Disappointed by the
lack of expression he found in voiceover artists accustomed to corporate
films, he also struggled to tap appropriate talent from the theatre world.
Zende recounts, "One chappy, we put him in front of a mike, and he was a
mouse. I said, "What happened to you? You were so good on stage."
Like other entrepreneurs who have jumped into the fray, Zende says he was
motivated by apprehension that India's reading public was shrinking. Yet he
was also convinced that India could develop a strong market for audio books,
given its oral traditions. As a child, he listened to Marathi stories
recorded on cassette tapes, including works by writer P.L. Deshpande.
Zende's business partner and co-founder Jayashree Mantri Easwaran had a
different experience. Recalling her student days, while studying for exams
in taxation and finance, Easwaran found it easier to digest the material if
someone read it to her. Later, after quitting her job at Fidelity, the
notion of producing audio books proved appealing.
They want solid talent, but they also want it cheap. It's a common story,
north and south. While the rising tide of audio books in the US may be
helping American actors snag decent paychecks in between more glamorous
gigs-as reported recently in The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal-the Indian scene is far less lucrative. Actors in the US typically
collect $150 to $450 an hour in audioland, a distant dream for thespians on
the subcontinent.
Audio books have also boosted the careers of a handful of Indian actors
settled abroad. Take Firdous Bamji, whose dramatic, crisp recording of
Siddharta by Hermann Hesse sounds far more impressive than many other audio
samples on the web. Bamji, who was born in Mumbai and now divides his time
between New York and London, was also tapped to record The Hungry Tide by
Amitav Ghosh and The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.
Sneha Mathan is another favourite, having picked up a couple of Earphone
awards from the prestigious AudioFile magazine in the US. Mathan describes
her Indian childhood as "peripatetic" and lived in the Seychelles before
eventually moving to Seattle. With her engaging range of character-voices,
Mathan seems to rise above the sometimes-annoying prose of Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni.
Production companies linked to Amazon have also started to reach into India's
local talent pool. In Mumbai, actor and voiceover artist Mallika
Krishnamurthy got a commission last year to record KR Usha's literary novel,
A Girl and a River. Her audio sample was plucked from the multitudes listed
on a voice-over website. Krishnamurthy's rendering also seems designed to
appeal to the domestic Indian market, with its authentic pronunciations of
southern Indian locales. She never resorts to a bland American accent such
as the one sported by US-born Sanjiv Jhaveri, the actor/narrator chosen for
another Ghosh saga, River of Smoke.
Krishnamurthy says it took her about two weeks to record Usha's novel. She
worked four or five hours at a stretch. At one point, she realized that the
family described in the novel bore a striking similarity to people in her
own family. "It's a full circle. It's gone all the way to Amazon, then comes
back to us, and turns out to resemble a distant relative," she observes.
For Love of God, and Literature
Some of the more intriguing experiments in audio books revolve around
religion. In Bangalore, a non-profit organization called the World Cassette
Outreach of India has managed to record the Bible in 87 different Indian
languages since 1982, according to James Sundarajan. That includes
relatively obscure tongues such as Zou and Grasia, along with such stalwarts
as Kannada and Tamil. In recent years the group has ditched cassettes in
favour of digital recordings that are then distributed to remote communities
through a $30 solar-powered device called "Megavoice," manufactured in China
and purchased by an affiliated office in the US.
Over the years, the group has refined its strategy for recruiting narrators.
Many students from the Northeast come to Bangalore to attend Bible colleges,
providing a convenient talent pool. "We try to get them before they are
overloaded with English," says Sundarajan.
He only relies on male voices. "If you give out a Bible in a female voice,
it might not be well received," Sundarajan explains. "Some people might say,
if a woman is reading it, why should I listen to it? Certain places in the
northeast don't encourage women to stand up in church."
With the help of missionaries, he has also tried to bring uneducated
villagers to Bangalore for studio sessions. But that has been problematic.
Some narrators have experienced deep culture shock in the city, disoriented
by loud, congested roads. One young Manipuri came down with typhoid, and
refused to take his medicine. "Some are so homesick, they never come back to
the studio," adds Sundarajan. But with the advent of portable studios,
those recording sessions can now happen closer to home.
Meanwhile, California resident Anindita Bhattacharya is busy churning out a
very different set of audio books in her own home. Having grown up in
Tripura, and moved to the US to earn a PhD in electrical engineering, she
decided to launch a Bengali audio book website in 2011. She is the sole
narrator, applying a sunny, lilting voice to the short stories, novels and
poems that she cherished during her childhood and adolescence. "The rest I
select from various topics, including humour and women's empowerment," she
explains.
All the material is provided free. A particularly popular title is lti
Tomar Maa by Sanjib Chattopadhyay, a story about a boy named Buro who
clashes with his classmates.
In an email exchange, Bhattacharya says that she initially aimed to appeal
to overseas Bengali communities. One year later, feedback on the website
convinced her that she had many more listeners in India and Bangladesh. In
2012 she discovered that a village school for the blind in West Bengal was
relying on her recordings to help its student. Bhattacharya has moved to
collect donations for the school, and encouraged downloads to be distributed
to other blind schools in the state.
Back in Kolkata, Asha Audio owner Mahua Lahiri is busy promoting the only
audio book ever recorded by Rituparno Ghosh, the director whose untimely
death in May saddened his fans. The recording, released in August, feeds the
seemingly insatiable appetite for works by Rabindranath Tagore - this time a
radio play entitled Streer Patro. Sales also reflect a sentimental desire to
preserve some trace of Ghosh's irrepressible free spirit.
Some authors see great potential for audio books in regional languages, even
though the current scenario is rife with English-language best-sellers. "I
think it is an area where Indian publishing might grow very fast over the
next few years," says novelist and literature professor Rimi Chatterjee, who
has studied the history of publishing in India. "There are languages we can
understand better in an oral version than a written version," she adds,
referring to several Hindi authors that she would enjoy listening to. "Of
course, it's also like translation-very easy to mess up."
Yet critics might argue that audio books miss out on the sensual pleasure of
reading a real, old-fashioned book. Not necessarily just for those who enjoy
the musty smell of a collectible or the whiff of a newly printed page. There
can be something profoundly satisfying about concentrating on a text,
sinking deep into a sofa and shutting out the world.
In contrast, promoters assume that multi-tasking is the supreme way to
exist. Partnered with jogging, cooking, driving, gardening, and other
activities, audio books are said to enrich the listener and even preserve
family harmony. They are said to inspire efficiency, self-improvement, and
overall, curtail the natural tendency to space out.
Someday, someone will probably record an audio book about the need to
preserve a little empty space in the mind. Let's hope the narration doesn't
come with elevator music.
Margot Cohen is a writer from New York. Her interest in India follows
previous reporting stints in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
----- Original Message -----
From: "shyam sharma" <[email protected]>
To: "AccessIndia: a list for discussing accessibility and issues
concerningthe disabled." <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [AI] Market for Audio Books in India.
hello sir, greetings. Indebted to you for sharing the tip of this
news along with the source. If possible then please paste the linked
article as well cause for many of us it consumes so much time to
launch the external sites due to limited data plans. And also it will
be very convenient for mobile users.
Best regards:
Shyam
On 9/26/13, Amiyo Biswas <[email protected]> wrote:
I just read the story on the up and coming market for audio books in
India.
Perhaps you will like reading it at
http://in.news.yahoo.com/%E2%80%98heard%E2%80%99-any-good-books-lately--075709549.html
With best Regards,
Amiyo Biswas
Cell: +91-9433464329
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