MUMBAI -
Suresh Bhura Pawar was busy scooping his take in a
US$320 million racket when the Mumbai police crashed his
business earlier this month. They raided his shop in
suburban Ville Parle and seized over 15,000 pirated
books worth $100,000, a small booty in a book piracy
boom taking place in India.
"This was the first
complaint about piracy that has come to my notice,"
senior inspector Damodar Shinde at the Ville Parle
police station told Asia Times Online. "The owner
confessed that he had been doing this business for eight
months. He had ordered the books from a printing press
in New Delhi."
Such printing presses in New
Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Meerut roll out
pirated management, technological and educational books
- as well as best sellers - within two months of them
hitting book stores, causing the $1.6 billion Indian
book industry much heartburn, and over a quarter of its
sales.
Pawar was arrested under the Indian
Copyright Act. But he can stop worrying. Since the law
was first passed in 1956, not a single piracy-accused
has suffered a conviction, moans the anti-piracy cell in
India. The copyright act was amended in 1986 to give it
more teeth, but booking book bootleggers under the
category of "economic crime" means bail in less than a
week, and court cases dragging on for years.
Thanks to legal dawdling, many foreign
publishers opt to release cheaper Indian and Asian
editions. But this hardly stops fake books flooding
Indian cities, never mind the police periodically
busting a pirate or four. Counterfeit Harry Potter books
sell openly and briskly for under $8 a set in Mumbai
streets, as against $26 for the originals at bookstores.
Book buyers this correspondent spoke to had few
qualms about lapping up counterfeits, particularly
educational books. "We can't afford the cost of
originals," said Ganesh Kotalkar, a young media sales
executive in Mumbai, who said he recently bought two
pirated books on management at half the cost of
originals. Even if the buyers of pirated books were to
get arrested, instead of the sellers, Kotalkar said he
would still risk picking up a roadside fake or two.
Coral D'Souza sought deluded moral shelter,
saying she only buys pirated self-development best
sellers to gift to friends.
Photocopying outlets
in Indian cities add to the piracy boom, duplicating
select chapters of textbooks or entire books. Many
educational and research institutions - including
medical schools - photocopy expensive foreign books
under the watery pretext of insufficient funding to buy
the originals.
In a society with such handy
excuses and a readiness for corruption, India's
anti-piracy fighters face tough odds that include the
availability of smarter scanning and printing technology
to mass produce fakes. "India is next only to Bangladesh
and Pakistan in book piracy," Dr N Subrahmanyam,
managing director of Tata McGraw-Hill publishers and
chairman of the anti-piracy cell, told Asia Times Online
from his head office in New Delhi. "Book piracy in
Indonesia is bad, but the situation in South Asia is
worse."
Backed by the Federation of Publishers
and Booksellers of India and with 450 affiliated members
across India, Subrahmanyam's anti-piracy cell
coordinates work with the American Publishers
Association and the UK Publishers Association. "Till
recently piracy was mostly a problem faced by fiction
and paperback publishers," Subrahmanyam said. "But over
the last three to four years a lot of education books
have been pirated." He fears the quality of education
suffering in the future, with good writers of textbooks
getting less returns and then quitting the business.
Book pirates form a more visible part of a
bootlegged intellectual property industry in which
business software applications and movies top the list
of piracy victims. According to the Indian Manufacturers
Association of Information Technology, the level of
piracy - as a percentage of the total market - is as
high as 75 percent in business software and about 60
percent in movies.
Bishnu Kumar Sharma, a
stocky, bearded book vendor near the lush green Oval
Maidan in Mumbai, inhabits the lowest rung in the piracy
chain. He flourished a fake copy containing the combined
Lord of the Rings trilogy for $3.75, complete
with the Harper Collins imprint. The original cover
price of one book in the trilogy, as dutifully mentioned
in the pirated copy, costs $26.72.
Sharma
operates among the 50 second-hand book vendors thronging
either side of the busy stretch of road from Eros
Theater to the Shivaji terminus. He and his poorly
educated tribe learn of best sellers through customers,
know the value of rare books, and help book collectors
trace out-of-print editions.
"The supply of
pirated books is increasing," says Sharma. The fellow
who delivers his daily quota of pirated books has no
contact number. "He comes here at least once a day,
takes the order, delivers and receives cash," Sharma
said, adding that he knows of police raids in advance.
The book pirates have a well-oiled system. The
pirate or the fixer, as he is known, has no office, has
only cash transactions and leaves no invoice. "He
creates a mechanism to find out which books are moving
fast, in what discipline, and at what price," explains
Subrahmanyam. "He prints these books, sometimes in a
well-known press."
"The larger bookstores are
not so much affected by piracy as they have larger range
than only bestsellers," says R Sriram, chief executive
officer and managing director of Crossword, the biggest
bookstore in Mumbai. "The irony is that these are good
times for the book trade, but the pirates are
benefiting." He dismisses public perception that the
book business is doomed. With an annual turnover of
$13.63 million, he expects his Crossword chain to be
expanding from 18 stores across India to 30 in another
three years.
Sriram believes that the
anti-piracy war needs a multi-pronged strategy, beyond
mere police raids. He ranks creating public awareness
high on the priority list, particularly to counter
justifications for piracy.
"I completely reject
the idea that piracy exists because of the high cost of
original books," says Subrahmanyam. "Originals that cost
as cheap as Rs 100 [US$2.27] or Rs 150 are being pirated
and sold for Rs 30. Piracy thrives because of greed."
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India
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Apr 23, 2004
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