E-publishers look to bridge the gap between vernacular content and readers by translating books

A growing number of publishing startups such as news and ebooks mobile app Dailyhunt and self publishing platform Pratilipi are targeting a $2-3 billion market
E-publishers look to bridge the gap between vernacular content and readers by translating booksA growing number of publishing startups such as news and ebooks mobile app Dailyhunt and self publishing platform Pratilipi are targeting a $2-3 billion market, aiming to bridge the gap between vernacular content and readers by translating books in Indian languages.

The startups are leveraging technology to speed up the process of publishing books in different languages. Dailyhunt uses optical character recognition (OCR) and machine-learning techniques for translation and epublishing of books in 12 Indian languages.

"The OCR is run across scanned images for converting a printed book into an ecopy and the machine learning converts a printed character into electronic text in whichever language is required," said cofounder Umesh Kulkarni. The technology takes 12 seconds per page to convert the image into electronic text. There is up to 95% word accuracy level observed during the conversion process.

The book will be checked manually and if there are any errors found, the correct translations will be fed into the machine to improve accuracy levels. A 150-page book with 20,000 words would take up to four hours for the entire publishing process to complete. The company is aiming to make it two hours. Dailyhunt, backed by Matrix Partners, claims to work with more than 10,000 authors within 1,500 publishing entities.

"We collect money from the customer. When dealing directly with the author, royalties vary between 15% and 20% for each book; when dealing directly with the publisher, they receive 40-45% per book," said N Ravanan, head of partnerships and publisher relationships at Dailyhunt. Self-publishing platform Pratilipi publishes in six Indian languages with Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali being the most popular.

It is looking to expand to six more languages, including Telugu, Kannada and Urdu. "We saw over 6,00,000 content pieces that were read last month and we have been seeing 20-30% growth in reader base month on month," said founder Ranjeet Singh.

The platform is claimed to have 2,700 writers on board, out of which about 600 write on a monthly basis, publishing over 2,000 copies on the portal. Local language writers directly publish their work onto the platform.

Pratilipi uses an algorithm to curate the content, based on how much time a user spends reading the content. The platform will be launching two new features.

One will enable the readers to follow their favourite authors and receive notifications about the publication of their work. The second is a private messaging feature through which readers can communicate with the author, without the author disclosing details like email address.

Nandan Nilekani-backed mobile-first publishing platform Juggernaut is currently focused on Hindi and English but is considering publishing in other local languages in the future. The startup plans to launch an app in April.

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