Democratising Literature: How Pratilipi is Transforming India's Digital Reading Landscape

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Excerpts from the interview:
Q: How did Pratilipi come about?
A: So back in the day, when I was a child, I used to read a lot of Hindi

comics

, just like a lot of people of my age group did. Then I grew up, I started reading contemporary Hindi

literature

. Then I started reading like almost anything in Hindi that I could find. Then I went to pursue my engineering in Bhubaneswar and I suddenly realised that Hindi content was just not available. Physical bookstores could only carry a few thousand titles out of which like maybe 50 or 100 would be in Hindi. There really wasn't anything in 2006, definitely not in Indian

languages

. So I had to shift to reading in English, but I did not like it. So I told my friends that the world should not be like this. It should be my choice if I want to read in Hindi or English or French or Malayalam or Tamil or any other language. I did my MBA, then worked for a couple of years. That seemed a little too easy. So I quit my job and I was thinking, what should I do next? Around the same time, my friends to whom I had complained in the past told me, ‘You have been talking about this for such a long time, and if nobody else is solving this problem, why don't you give it a shot?’ So that's how Pratilipi was born. And those are the same friends that I essentially poached as my co-founders as well as my early team members.

Q: Choice is the thing which exists throughout your platform. The consumer, the reader, the audience, whichever way you may see it, can access the product as per their choice or upload as per their choice. Is it not the case?
A: That is absolutely the case. In fact, a lot of times I have said this publicly. For example, people tell me that you are making India read again. And I always say that we are not making India do anything. Our thought process is that who am I to tell someone whether they should read or listen or watch? What we want to do is that we want to present great stories from great storytellers to the rest of the world, and then people can decide which format works best for them, which languages work best for them. Our job is not to tell people what to do. Rather, our job is to give people a platform that provides them access across multiple languages, across multiple formats, and hopefully across multiple geographies. That is one of the fundamental beliefs of why Pratilipi exists in the first place.
Q: Does accessing Pratilipi require a very sophisticated form of infrastructure or is it device agnostic? How has the software and the programming been created? Is it available to many?
A: We have absolutely been clear on this that we want to be accessible and available to everyone as far as possible. So as long as you have a phone on which you can access apps like WhatsApp or YouTube, you should be able to access Pratilipi as well.
Q: Do you think in the long term, maybe in the near future, this kind of financial model on the Internet will create a different kind of expectation in the consumer and writer or reader. And will it change publishing and the publishing ecosystem in any way?
A: I think there would be fundamental changes in many ways. So first and foremost is that from a writer's perspective, two things change significantly. First is that from a writer's perspective, in the physical world, you only publish a book, let's say, once every six months. Even the most prolific writers will typically only publish, let's say, once in a month. Secondly, that you can only make let's say 10%, 15% of book sales as royalty versus in digital, there are no fixed cost involved. So, one, you can publish on a daily basis. You can interact with your readers on a daily basis. In physical world, you don't get to know who is reading your book. But with online or Internet-based communities like Pratlipi itself, you get day-to-day feedback. And instead of making like 5%, 10% or 15% of your revenue, you are generally making more like 30%, 40%, 50% of royalty.
The most important change is accessibility. So typically what happens in physical world is that either you go to a library and read if you don't have money to pay or you have to buy a book in full before you can essentially read that book. Versus for online literature platforms like Prathlipi for example, generally we have a model of wait and unlock. So if you do not, if you cannot afford to pay for whatever reason, you can come every day and read another chapter for free. So I think fundamentally the model makes just so much more sense for readers and writers that we'll see publishing evolve towards this area.
Q: What are the elements that you have borrowed from other existing digital platforms and incorporated and perhaps even adapted at Pratilipi?
A: A lot of different things. I spend a lot of time learning from all the other large markets, including us, China, Korea, Japan, on what kind of works for both readers and writers. And we always had this one constant that I never wanted to change because that is why Pratilipi started that we did not want money to ever become a reason of why people cannot read something. So we wanted to make sure that even if you don't have money, you should still be able to consume any content that you want. So that was a vision-based constraint, not a strategy-based constraint. So one of the first lessons that we learned, for example, was that the product has to be incredibly simple to use both for readers and for writers. Second thing we learned was that people generally want to read. Third, that we wanted to make sure that writers kind of feel like they are at the centre versus Pratilipi.
Q: We are talking about creating content. How do you manage accountability amongst the writers who are creating the content? How do you ensure that it is original and not AI written?
A: We actually encourage people to use AI just like any other technology, while making sure that they are not using it to infringe on someone else's copyright. They are not using it to do something which is morally or ethically or legally wrong, but they're using it to make themselves more productive. As long as the creative insight is coming from your mind, you should be able to use whatever tool fits the use case best.