It is now common to see people waiting for their flights at Indian airports browsing through written content on their handheld devices. But when you compare with similar situations in countries like the USA the Indian numbers are abysmally low. Is India ready to make a complete move to the digital publishing stage? Not yet. Are we ever going to see eReaders surpass printed books in India? Probably never. There are challenge to eReader adoption in India.
One can always argue that the owning a single eReader device is akin to owning a few hundred books so comparison with printed books is really injudicious. The point is well made and taken too. But one cannot help but point out that the eReader owners in India don’t even form a tiny percentage of the overall population. And we are talking of a billion plus Indian population.
All the top eReader manufacturers have made their entry into the Indian market. Amazon, Kobo and Nook are all here. However, the kind of euphoria that these manufacturers were expecting is hardly there. And it is easy to see why.
Let us divide the urban Indian population into young and not young. The rural population is discounted here because let them get 24-hour electricity first and then we can expect them to buy something as fanciful as an eReader.
The young urban Indian is completely besotted with smartphones and the not young urban India is still coming to terms with LED TVs and Apple iPad. The eReaders, unfortunately, don’t fit into any of these categories. And when one can spend tad more (than what they would need to spend on an Amazon Kindle, for instance) and bring back home a 32¨ LCD TV or an iPad Mini, doesn’t it still make more sense to buy one of these devices? This is precisely what the average Indian thinks.
There is this common perception in the Indian mind that an eReader can only be used to read books. A tablet, on the other hand, can be used for multiple purposes, reading eBooks being one of them. So, the perceived value of tablets is still much more in India. Remember the Maruti ads anyone? In fact, many of those that own eReaders already have tablets.
These challenges to eReader adoption in India are simple, but they are seated deep within the average Indian’s psyche. Till the time the eReaders are not able to break the code, they will continue to remain “good to have”.
Image credit: Annie Mole on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Profile_Pic_Moumita.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Moumita Goswami is a full-time homemaker and a passionate writer. She stays in Pune with her husband and daughter. After giving up working, she started writing about five years ago and can now be seen using her computer keyboard almost all the time. An MA in Psychology from Calcutta University, Moumita has spent time in Kolkata, Delhi and now Pune. For Moumita, writing started as a sudden chance but she soon discovered her likeness for it. And now she has developed a passion for writing and hardly any day passes without her scribbling a few lines. She dreams of publishing her own book one day and is working towards it.
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