BENGALURU: Amazon ‘s Kindle has launched digital books in five Indian languages and is in the process of adding more Indian languages to its collection. Kindle”s India sales grew 200% in 2015, and further accelerated this year, its India director for content Sanjeev Jha told TOI. The company has added thousands of best sellers and exclusive titles in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati and Malayalam.
“We have been working on innovations to make the experience the same as that for English. We had also learnings from launching it in other languages. This is day one and we will gather feedback to impro ve the offerings,” Jha said. He added that all the features available for the English language, like personalization, note taking, and page flip, will be standard for the Indian languages too with custom typesetting is the seamless reading experience.
Kindle expects India to surpass the US market in the next few years. Kindle, which lists more than 4 million digital books, has more than 10 crore app downloads on Google Play. Around half of Kindle users are accessing the services through the app on Google Play or Apple’s Appstore and the other half through the Kindle devices. The Indian subscription is priced at Rs 150 per month.
“With more than a bill ion smartphones expected in India, this is going to be a big market. We don’t have languages from South East Asia or West Asia yet and that shows the importance of the Indian market is Amazon . It was a lot of effort to transform the Indian publishing ecosystem as we had to scan the physical books,” Jha said. Kindle already had the Indian English books and Jha said that the focus was to add the most relevant books rather than trying to publish every book.
Jha said that Indians are value seekers and Kindle offers a fair value for the price. Amazon is working towards bringing government publications and educ ational books on Kindle. Wh en Amazon customers take up digital readership, they tend to read four times more than they read physical books (based on the sales of physical books on Amazon ). However in India, the Kindle user downloads ten times the number of books that he/she bought in physical form. Outside of the US, Amazon ‘s Chennai R&D centre is the biggest for Kindle and other devices of Amazon . The Indian centre works mostly on the software for the devices.
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