In co-operation with the National Book Trust, organizers of the New Delhi Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair organized a seminar on “Business opportunities in STM and educational publishing” at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi on 31 January and February 1, 2008. There were about 50 delegates at the conference, mostly from across the country and a few from the United States, Switzerland, UK and Germany. The seminar was useful for traditional publishers planning to diversify or leverage ePublishing and also for start-ups who were looking to enter the internet enabled outsourcing market for publishing in the STM and educational segments.

In her welcome note Claudia Kaiser, Director, Frankfurt Book Fair, International Department, repeated that the opportunities in India were immense. She said India has been the only country to be the guest of honour twice at the Frankfurt fair, in 1986 and 2006. She also announced the opening of the German book office, which will be inaugurated in Delhi sometime in March 2008.

There was a segment on STM and educational publishing within the countries and its internet enabled exports. The moderator of the session was Herman P Spruijt, Vice President of the International Publishers Association. Robert Baensch, President of Baensch International Group Ltd, focused on Digital Information in higher education markets. He discussed the impact of eLearning based on actual applications and technologies currently used by publishers, emphasizing Web 2.0, which is suitable for STM community to educate the author to deliver the manuscript, to re-create data and also make co-authoring of articles, which is a common practice, much simpler.

Vikas Gupta, managing director, Wiley India spoke of the paradigm shift in the science and technology. He explained how Asian Nations had become the hub for hi-tech research. India was viewed as a safe and attractive investment destination for research in view of India’s adherence to patent laws and strong legal system backed by a strong democracy and free press. In the educational field new ventures could be undertaken by procuring content from both global and Indian sources for developing books in India. Content could be revised and modified with Indian and Asian case studies.

NK Mehra, managing director of Narosa Publishing House shared his insights of publishing scientific, technical and medical (STM) books in India. He said that there was scope for STM and educational publishers by highlighting some statistics. The Indian economy is 1.5 per cent of the global economy and is expected to triple to 4.6 per cent by 2030. India spends 3 per cent of its GDP on education and has more than 220 universities more than 1,10,000 science colleges and about 1400 engineering colleges. India also has the second largest pool of scientific trained manpower in the world after America. Moreover India is an English language market that publishes 80,000 titles in English annually. Mehra mentioned that several Indian titles are now used as classroom texts in China and the US.

Robert Baensch presented some of the new trends in electronic publishing. He said eLearning was important to break down the traditional system by the use of text, sound, images and video. He said there was a demand for integration of tools and activities and a rise of learning outcomes by eLearning, leading to a digital content revolution.

Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys Inc, USA woke up the audience. Saying that publishing in India was at the beginning of a transformation, he highlighted the advantages for STM publishers to go digital. Speaking from experience as his company deals with online content delivery for the STM, children’s and educational publishing markets, he said that a publisher must not be afraid of his print sales being cannibalised by moving online but be aware of the threat of new companies who are already online and have a competitive edge. It’s important that publishers’ not think of themselves as just book publishers but as content companies, which was a key to success.

Ray McLennan, Director of Motilal (UK) books in India explained digital sales and distribution, saying this new field of publishing had two main avenues of distribution. The first is to the public at large and the other was to libraries, mainly universities. He mentioned one might not want to work through an eBook rights agent. There is a need for Adobe Acrobat pdf’s. All publishers must have an e-isbn dedicated solely to the electronic version. There should be metadata on a spread sheet with author, title, e-isbn, price and currency, imprint and publishers name if different and cover image. New title alerts were also important to create awareness.

Also discussed over the 2 days in the conference were rights and licenses and the Indian rights market, which was discussed by V.K Karthika, publisher and chief editor of Harper Collins in India. Robert Baensch and Ray McLennan again spoke of international cooperation, joint ventures and acquisitions as they apply to the publishing industry.