The Global eBook Report: Current Conditions & Future Projections. Update October 2013

enrolments in EdX courses, after the US. The platform has partnered with Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay to make the latter’s courses available to a global audience.
    Ebook publishing
    E-textbooks
    The government in India dominates the K–10 textbook segment by publishing textbooks for schools. The National Council of Educational Resources and Training (NCERT), provides its entire textbook range for download, as PDF files online.
    Over 90% of all e-textbooks available for higher education in the country originate outside India, and are in the English language. [N5] Springer leads the list of ebook providers, with nearly 74,000 titles in the catalogue. Publishers listed once above, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, as well as Tata McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press are selling ebooks in India now. Not just for STM, but ebooks on subjects like Law, Management, Social Sciences and the Humanities are being produced in digital formats, and being made available through the publishers’ websites. However, individual sales are very few, and most e-textbooks sell through library suppliers. Many publishers offer ebooks at discounted rates from their international prices, up to 50% in some cases, for bulk purchase by Indian institutional libraries.
    Some online stores like Attano and SkoolShop are retailing a sizeable list of educational ebooks by Indian publishers, showcasing the early phase of indigenous ebook production in the education space. Attano hosts about 1500 books and 7500 educational videos for K–12, along with exam preparation materials, question banks and materials for college test preparation. It launched a new service called ChapterBuy in June 2013, to sell individual chapters from reference books for higher education in an ebook format. Attano will make available over 10,000 chapters, priced Rs 3 ($0.05) onwards, for engineering, management and commerce students. The company has partnered with Mumbai-based Sheth Publishers and Pearson for this initiative. Exam preparation materials, especially for entrance exams are also available through Vriti and The Digital Library .
    Bharti Airtel , India’s largest mobile network operator, introduced test preparations and English-learning modules on mobile through its mEducation platform, which it launched in early January 2013. The service enables Airtel mobile customers to access courses for language skills, entrance exam preparation and career counseling for as little as Rs 2 ($0.02) per day.
    More and more Indian publishers of educational books are digitizing their backlists and creating digital products from their frontlist. PHI Learning_’s list of ebooks (about 700 digitised titles) is available directly from their website. Medical books publisher, _Jaypee Brothers have published nearly 1215 ebooks, as well as produced 2250 videos on surgical procedures, available through their websites. Anmol Publications , a publisher of pure sciences, humanities and social sciences books is digitizing 6000 and more titles and offering those as ebooks. Publisher of Physical Sciences and Mathematics books, Hindustan Book Agency , is also in the process of publishing ebooks.
    In the school-books segment, which is controlled upto 75–80% by the government bodies, private publishers have to operate in the remaining space. Yet, demand for books is increasing. Publishers like S. Chand, Ratna Sagar , Orient Blackswan are investing in creating digital products, both ebooks and online learning aids, although they feel that it will take another five years for students to start reading digitally in a big way. Orient Blackswan’s educational ebook sales are less than 0.02% of the company’s total sales, said a company representative. [N6]
    Student attitudes towards e-textbooks, and other aspects such as quality of electronic versions of books, enhancements, and their integration with classroom pedagogy are yet to be examined and reviewed. There is no indication of e-textbooks being core textbooks for students yet. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a long way to go, for students to get seamless access to the electronic books both on and off campus.
    Trade ebooks
    There is a lot of activity in the trade ebook segment. Almost all major trade publishers (English-language publishers) have released ebooks. In July 2012, Penguin Books India’s was the first major e list, of nearly 240 titles, that was released in the