To encourage youngsters to read more, National Book Trust (NBT) plans to open up book promotion centres, and is tying up with post offices to sell books and is constantly on the move, holding book fairs across the country, said top officials of the organisation here on Sunday.
A day before opening of a weeklong book fair here, MA Sikandar, director National Book Trust, speaking to the mediapersons said, “The shortage of space has forced us to only display books from 32 publishers whereas, more than 50 of them had shown interest in setting up stalls here at Shimla.”He denied that the sale of books was declining. “Actually physical book sales have increased,” said Sikandar.
He added that footfalls at NBT book fairs were increasing year after year. “Novel reading was on the decline and the growing interest was in biographies,” he said.The trust that works directly under the Human Resource Development Ministry, after setting up a book promotion centre at Chennai has drawn up plans to open similar stores at Agartala, Guwahati, Hyderabad and Patna before expanding to other cities. E-commerce giant Amazon.com only recently approached us for selling NBT publications through online sales, Sikandar disclosed.
Having tied up with Department of Posts for selling books through post offices in Uttarakhand, the director of NBT said that to improve availability of books, a similar pilot project would be explored for Himachal Pradesh also.With e-books gaining popularity, the trust has also ventured into e-publishing. “Mainly to cater to the demand of Indian Diaspora, we are making available about 500 titles in e-book format, said Sikandar.
For Himachal, this would be the second book fair of the year as the organisers have already held one at Mandi in May.Foraying to reprinting old books that do not involve any copyright infringements, Sikandar said that NBT is talking to Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla for publishing European travelers’ accounts of India.
Many of these reprints published by many private publishing houses are highly priced.The weeklong book fair would be inaugurated at the historic Gaiety Theatre by Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh on Monday and would end on July 6.During the week, talks and interactive sessions with writers, mainly local ones have been scheduled.On July 2, the organisers have also scheduled to release The Flowerwoods Hotel by writer Raaja Bhasin. The NBT publication, “is a collection of five short stories,” said Bhasin.
