eBooks in India

Digits - WSJ:

... With last week’s release of “Wink,” Bangalore’s EC Media claims to have launched India’s first e-reader tailored to serve the local population. One can’t help but wonder, are e-books worth the money and will Indians take to them as eagerly as many have in the U.S.?

While techno geeks may like this new device, only 42% of the people that buy books in India are habitual readers, according to a survey in Tehelka Magazine early this year.

The survey, which asked 1,152 people across the country about their reading habits, found that while 20% of the respondents said they had read e-books, 92% of them were using PCs, not reading devices like Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Daily Reader.

A survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research published in the Financial Express estimated that there are only around 83 million non-syllabus book readers in India. Researcher, Preeti Kakkar, said the survey sampled over 311,431 literate youth all over the country.\

“Our reader has the distinct advantage of being the only one to support so many Indian languages,” Pradeep Palazhi, chief operating officer of EC Media told India Real Time. “It will also have a free newspaper service called Wink Wire where owners will get daily regular news updates.”

While the language capability may make it attractive to Indian buyers, it will be years before any e-reader is real competition for books said B. Narayanaswamy, president of Ipsos Indica Research in New Delhi.

“I see a whole new generation of people getting into e-books, but those people will mostly be the kind who are more tech savvy, have grown up on the Internet and are upwardly mobile,” he said. Some of the biggest buyers of books in India are libraries, he said, and they only buy bound books. ...