• Information for Authors and Publishers
• Existing e-books (many are free too – try them out)

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From our Press Release

Pothi.com, India’s leading Print-on-Demand backed publishing platform has launched e-book publishing and selling for independent authors and publisher. The platform is free to use and authors get 75% of MRP as royalty.

Bangalore, July 12, 2010: Taking another step towards its mission of making publishing accessible to all, Bangalore based Pothi.com has added e-book publishing and selling to its publishing platform. The platform allows authors to sell e-books starting at Rs. 50/- or even give them away for free as a marketing tool. All the books sold through the store will use Social DRM which will allow tracking of the source in case of piracy.

Publishing through the platform is as simple as creating a word or openoffice file according to the guidelines provided and submitting it online. The platform takes care of generating the e-book files. There are no upfront costs and the authors get 75% of the MRP as royalty on sales from the Pothi.com store. They retain all the rights on the book as well as get full control over the pricing and availability. An online dashboard provides real time statistics of sales and earnings for all their books.

“E-books are gaining momentum all over the world. They represent an excellent opportunity for the authors and publishers to connect directly with the readers. Our aim is to enable them to make best use of the medium without getting overwhelmed with the technicalities”, says Jaya Jha, one of the co-founders of the company.

One of the common concerns regarding e-books is of piracy. To address piracy, a variety of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions are available from different vendors. DRM typically refers to the technologies which restrict the use of e-book in various ways to prevent piracy. However, existing DRM technologies are incompatible with each other and using DRMed e-books can become a hassle for the genuine buyers.

As an alternative to using vendor specific DRM, Pothi.com is offering social DRM. Social DRM puts no restrictions on the usage of the e-book but embeds some personal information of the buyer in the files. One common example is the name and contact information of the buyer. This discourages people from sharing the files on p2p networks while still giving them full flexibility of copying between their own devices. Thus Social DRM creates a win-win situation for both the parties. When a buyer downloads the purchased e-book from Pothi.com, his e-mail id is stamped in a non-obtrusive way on every page. It discourages piracy while still being convenient to the genuine buyers.

“Since e-books are available for immediate downloads, it is particularly helpful in situations where a reader needs instant access to the book’s content. Many international readers also prefer to buy e-books because they don’t want to wait out the shipping time. We were regularly receiving enquiries from our authors, who wanted to be able to provide e-books to such readers.” explains Abhaya Agarwal, who is also the co-founder of the company.

Further details and the catalog of books already published through the platform are available on Pothi.com’s website http://pothi.com

Since this vol has grown up to 320 pages, we also created 2 smaller books each having 6 entries. If you want, you can buy one of the two smaller volumes which contain 164 pages each. These smaller books are available at 10% discount.

Check out more about COMIX.INDIA on their website.

COMIX.INDIA Vol II only became possible because of the combined effort of a dozen contributors, an editor and a designer. Read on to know more about this awesome bunch. Should we call them the Daring Dozensome?

E. P. Unny grew up in Palakkad, Kerala. He’s been a professional cartoonist since 1977, with The Hindu, Sunday Mail, The Independent, Newstime, Business Standard, and The Economic Times. Since 1996, he’s been the Chief Political Cartoonist of The Indian Express. His books include “Spices & Souls, A Doodler’s Journey through Kerala” and “Business as Usual”, a collection of Indian Express cartoons. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Institute of Cartooning.

Jai Iyer heads a technology startup by day and turns into cape-clad comic creator by night. He lives in Bangalore, and lists among his superpowers the ability to summon autorickshaws at will. Visit his website at http://iyermatter.wordpress.com

Lavanya Karthik writes, draws and lives her comics in Mumbai.

Shreyas Deshpande is an artist based in Pune. He has a keen interest in Comics and Animation, and does the former for fun and the latter as a job. He also wonders why he is writing about himself in the third person.

Sudeep Menon is a still drawing stories, and expects more insanity to follow.

Vinay Brahmania graduated from JJ School Of Applied art in 1987 specialised in illustration. Along with two business partners, he heads a small creative workshop in munbai, called Fast Forword Advertising. He’s always been interested in graphic novels, and that is exactly what he sees himself doing in the near future.

P Narendra is in his 13th year of imprisonment. He is hopeful of a release soon. He believes that unless you try anything, you can never be sure how good you are, and that is precisely what pushed him to drawing his comic. He is a vivid music listener, and loves playing the violin.

Rimi B. Chatterjee is a academic and novelist of two books – 2005′s Signal Red, a science-fiction story, and 2007′s The City Of Love, which was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award. Her third novel, Black Light, is due out in 2010. Empires of the Mind, her academic history of Oxford University Press’s relations with India before 1947, won the SHARP de Long Book Prize in 2006. She teaches English at Jadavpur University and is working on a graphic novel titled Kalpa: Shadowfalls. She writes at www.rimibchatterjee.net

Sumit Kumar was supposed to be an Computer Science Engineer before he interned at Cartoonist Pran’s studio. He has written for Savita Bhabhi, performs stand-up in delhi and works with Random Magazine. He’s pissed off with the average family life, education system and the President-Aunty Pratibha Patil.
apunsumit.blogspot.com

Meghana Kulkarni is a 26 year old architect, who’s called Pune her hometown since the last 8 years. She started drawing comics at the age of 10, but rediscovered the art when she started studying architecture. She’s a D-I-Y freak, and enjoys hanging around with her friends, cycling, reading and photography.

Nandita Basu pretends to be a pianist, sometimes a writer, sometimes a graphic artist and sometimes an animator. Her book Rory And Tusker was published in 2003. She’s been lucky enough to have had short animations feature in various festivals last year. Currently, she’s in the process of realizing an original composition of some blues-jazz music with a few friends.

Shishir Naik is a Mumbai-based freelance illustrator / visual developement artist. He graduated from Sir JJ Institue of Applied Art with a BFA. He’s worked as a character designer / storyboard artist / animator on the animated feature film Hanuman, and on various other episodic projects for Silverline Animation. He’s online at shishir-naik.blogspot.com

Rajarshi Sengupta is pursuing his M.F.A. (printmaking) from the S.N. School University of Hyderabad. He can be reached on rajarshisengupta22@gmail.com

Vivek Goel was once employed with the merchant navy, but decided that he didn’t like it there and took up the study of the arts. He is is currently illustrating his first creator-owned project – Rayanayan, and is working with Level 10’s JUMP Magazine. He can be contacted on skycapricorn@gmail.com

Aditya Bidikar has been writing since he was 11, and hasn’t yet learnt how to stop. He currently works as a translator and writes bits and bobs (including short stories and comics) in his free time. He can be contacted on adibidi@gmail.com

Bharath Murthy currently makes non-fiction videos for a living, but hopes to earn a living writing comics as well. He is working on a book of ‘essay comics’. His website is bcomix.wordpress.com and you can mail him on actionist@gmail.com

Kailash Iyer considers himself a design student, even though his degree says Bachelors in IT and Masters in Communication Management. He doesn’t like early mornings, and sometimes wishes he were a base-jumper or a clock-maker. Occasionally, he considers updating his online portfolio at www.kailashiyer.com. Perhaps by the time the next issue rolls out, he would have.

Here is a reproduction of “From the Publisher’s Desk” section -

Dear Readers,

It goes without saying that we take immense pleasure in presenting to you the inaugural issue of Pothiz – Pothi.com’s online magazine. We see Pothiz as a natural extension to our efforts of providing the young and unheard voices a platform where they could engage, be heard, get valuable feedback directly from their readers and flourish into wonderful wordsmiths. While Pothi.com remains an open platform for a variety of publishing endeavors, Pothiz is going to be a more curated collection of creative writings. Our hope is that this collection will encourage readers to delve into and discover the hidden gems in the proverbial “long tail” of writing.

We received close to a hundred entries and selecting a few for your reading pleasure was not an easy task. At Pothi.com, we particularly respect the fact the each individual has his or her own taste in reading and writing. So, apart from the entries that made it to the main issue, we are also going to put up some of the other entries we have received on the website. Do read them and give your praises or constructive feedback to the authors through comments.

Coming to the entries included in the issue, the Featured entry ‘The Soul is a Battery’ delighted us with its interesting and novel take on ghost stories. It entertains, it frightens and it leaves you nodding in agreement with the feelings of the characters. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Amongst other stories, ‘The Matrimonial Clock’ will resonate particularly well with the urban career oriented professionals. It is a story of how they have to cope with the conflicting needs of matrimony and career. ‘Thirteen Hours of Fame’, ‘Practical Lessons’ and ‘The idiot’ are the stories about the opportunism, the hypocrisy, the good and the bad in common people – just like you and me.

While ‘Barberic Times’ and ‘God Promise’ are there to tickle you, ‘Goodbye Mrs. Boa’ is a sweet, but profound tribute to Boa Sr., the last speaker of Bo Language in Andaman islands. She died earlier this year. Other poems ‘City’s seasons’, ‘Elegy’, ‘Divine Sisterhood’, ‘बेटी होना का दर्द’ (The Pain of being a Daughter/Girl, Hindi) and ‘सूना बचपन‘ (Empty Childhood, Hindi) touch on the various stories, pleasures and pains of our human existence. ‘Oops! I made you a Daddy’ is a cute, little autobiography by a day old baby (ghost written by his father).

Finally, as you all battle with the fever of Football, do not forget to read the review for ‘Inverting the Pyramid’ by Jonathan Wilson. The book provides an interesting insight into how the gameplay has evolved over time and how the game is not just about the magical players!

We hope you enjoy the collection. Do send your feedback on the magazine and also on the individual entries. Entries are also invited for the next issue of the magazine. The deadline is July 16, 2010.

Pothi.com Team

It was 25 years ago, when she was pregnant with her daughter, that she started writing. Over years, the poems she wrote covered a variety of subject and emotions. Her father and her husband encouraged her with their appreciation, expectations as well as critical feedback. Her husband Ramesh even compiled her poems as spiral bound diaries couple of years back.

Her daughter Aparna went a step ahead and decided to publish the book as a gift on her mother’s 50th birthday, completing the cycle of inspiration!

As she celebrates her 50 happy years in this world on June 18, 2010, with her husband Ramesh, son Vignesh, daughter Aparna, son-in-law Vikash and her soon-to-be-born grand child, we also join in to wish her a very Happy Birthday! May she continue to spread the song of life through her poetry for many years to come. Her poetry collection is available on Pothi.com.

The content that is actually consumed by the Indian Language Market is mostly created for Print. Books, Newspapers etc. And the Unicode adoption there is low. There are historical reasons for that of course. Desktop Publishing Technologies came to publishing before Unicode had become prevalent. So, people in the industry got used to the non-standard fonts. Now if you move to Unicode, all the typists and the editors who work on typed content need to relearn the typing. Obviously, there is resistance. Plus many of the Desktop Publishing Software, still do not support the Complex Text Layout (CTL) needed for displaying Indian Languages correctly (see the previous post for understanding Complex Text Layout).

But there is another issue too. It is difficult to sell the idea to even the people higher up (who could possibly mandate the staff to relearn things and sanction purchase of right software), because good Unicode compatible fonts are not available. Speaking of Hindi, Mangal and Arial Unicode MS are two fonts available on Windows machine. Mangal just does not look good in print. Arial Unicode is slightly better, but people want more choices, while designing. A lot of Unicode fonts available from CDAC and other sites are downright ugly.

I am not sure of why better fonts are not coming to the market. Is it some kind of chicken and egg situation? The users would resist the change and hence not asking for the Unicode fonts. Companies making fonts, therefore, do not feel there is a market for Unicode Fonts. And there probably aren’t those techies around who understand both font design and Indian Languages well enough to create some beautiful, free fonts for Indian Languages.

Print adopting Unicode is very important for meaningful Unicode adoption for Indian Languages. Where do we start?

Before getting into Indian Language typing, let’s understand how does the computer understand what we type. We will understand this with the help of examples from English typing, since that is the language best handled by and understood on computers.

Computer understands individual characters. All letters, numbers, symbols are a character to the computer.  ‘A’ is a character, ‘a’ is another character, “,” (comma) is another character and so on.

Then there are fonts, which tell the computer how to display a particular character. So, the same set of characters “Pothi.com” will appear different in different fonts.

As you can see, “P” is displayed by the font “Times New Roman” is different from the “P” displayed by the font “Arial”, which in turn is different from the “P” displayed by the font “Monotype Corsiva”. Similar is the case with other characters like “o”, “t” etc.

What is important here is that computer still knows that a “P” is a “P”, irrespective of the font it is displayed in. That’s why when you use the “Find” or “Search” feature while typing, it will find you the word/character you searched for, irrespective of how the font displays it. In fact, the underlying system that recognizes what character it is, does not care at all as to how the font displays it. In the following image, the first line in “Pothi.com” in a font called “MT Extra”. The second line is the name of the font!

As you can see, the display makes no sense for an English reading human. But the computer does not care.

What this means is, that you can design a font, that displays certain English characters as certain letter in one of the Indian languages. We’ll take Hindi as an example.

The same set of characters “Pothi.com” in a font called “Kruti Dev 010″ become the following

Of course, it does not look anything like “Pothi.com” to English readers. Hindi readers can see Hindi alphabets (it’s not a meaningful combination). But to the computer, it is “Pothi.com”.

However, with this font to my aide, I can now concoct certain character combination, which would look like meaningful Hindi words to Hindi Readers. For example character set “dje #i” generated the following

Hindi Readers can identify meaningful words here. Even though for the computer it is just “dje #i”.

This is one way of typing Hindi. And most of the Hindi Books are typeset in this way, using one of the fonts, that display an English character as a Hindi letter.

When the ultimate aim is to print, this method works just fine. Once the book is printed, nobody cares what the original character stored in the computer was.

But this method has issues – big ones. For example

1. No standardization: When you don’t have characters assigned for the letters of your language in the computer, each font developer is free to decide which character should be displayed like which letter. So, one font decides to display “A” as “अ” and the other font decides to display “d” as “अ”. What do you do then? In English, you can write something and then change the font at the click on a button. But in Hindi, if you change the font after writing, you will get totally different letters displaying on the screen, which are likely to be meaningless. Plus for each font you have to learn the typing all over again!Lack of standardization is also a problem in the Internet World. If you type the content in one font and send it to someone, the recipient has to have the same font on his computer, in order to see the meaningful text you have written. Any other font will not do. Compare this to English, where you may type in one font and the other person may not have that font. But he can still read it, because whatever English font he has understands the underlying characters and displays the correct letters for an English reader.
2. Not searchable: In this system, the computer does not understand underlying characters of Hindi language. It is just the English language characters wearing a different look as far as the computer is concerned. So, there is no good way of searching through this content. In the Internet age, this is a major disadvantage. A lot of content available on Internet today is discovered only by search and if you want your content to be discovered, it is important that it is typed in a way so that it is searchable.

Unicode

It is to solve such problems that Unicode has come into picture. You can think of Unicode as something which enables computers to understand characters beyond English language. So, if your computer supports Unicode, it starts understanding not only the characters corresponding to “A”, “d”, “,” etc. but also the ones for “क्”, “अ” etc. And it’s not just the Indian languages, but it starts understanding characters corresponding to Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and most other major languages of the world!

So, with this you do not need to represent a random English character as a Hindi letter. The characters are available for Hindi and the font can now display those characters as the corresponding Hindi letters. Such fonts are called “Unicode compatible fonts”. To repeat, Unicode compatible Hindi fonts are the ones which do not represent an English characters as a Hindi letter, but which represent the Hindi characters as corresponding Hindi letters.

Typing and Input Method Editors (IMEs)

So far, so good. Computer, somehow, understands the characters for Hindi and other languages. But how do you type in those languages? Your keyboard still has only English letters on it. So, when you press the key labeled “A”, the computer knows that you want to type the character “a”. But how do you tell the computer that you want to type the character “अ”.

Multi-language keyboards are a design challenge, and at least for Indian languages, nothing great has come out. So, different ways have been devised to use the same English keyboard for inputting non-English characters. To  understand how these work, let’s consider this. As far as the computer is concerned (“A” and “a”) are two different characters. But from the keyboard, the same button is used to type either of them. How? “A” gets typed if either CAPS LOCK is on or the Shift key is pressed. Otherwise, it is “a” that gets typed. So, the computer decides that the character typed is “A” or “a” depending not only on the key pressed, but also depending on the state of CAPS LOCK and Shift key.

Following a similar tactic, we can give the computer some other signal that when the key labeled “A” is pressed, you have to enter neither “a”, nor “A”, but “अ”. How to give that signal? For that there are multiple methods. Basically computer programs have been created, that come in between the keyboard and computer storing the characters and depending on certain signals tell the computer which character has been entered. These programs are typically called “Input Method Editor (IME)”.

These IMEs do two things

1. They give you a way to specify the language you will be typing in
2. They assign particular keys on the keyboard to particular characters, depending on the language selected

Two examples of IMEs for Indian Languages are

1. Microsoft’s Indic Language IME
2. Google’s Indic IME

I have the first one installed on my computer and I’d use that as an example to illustrate how IME works. Once I install and configure Microsoft’s Indic IME for Hindi, I get a language selection button my taskbar

If I select, English here, then things work as usual. If I select Hindi, then pressing Shift+D on my keyboard types “अ” instead of “D”. Pressing “j” types “र” and so on. I can keep switching the language and type a piece of text which uses both the languages (as I am doing now).

To use an Indic IME like this, you still need to learn the key combinations that type the right characters for you. This combination may vary between different IMEs. In fact, even the same IME may provide you with different options for mapping of keys to characters. Microsoft’s Indic IME provides at least two such combinations for Hindi. One is called “INSCRIPT” layout, which I use (the key-character combinations I described in the previous paragraph was according to this layout). The other is Phonetic and as the name suggests, its key-character bindings are more phonetic; e.g. (A will “अ”, R will be “र” and so on).

But the advantage over the earlier scheme of using non-Unicode compatible font is that once you have learned to use one IME, you can use any Unicode compatible font. You don’t need to learn the map for every font separately. Plus you text is standard compliant and searchable!

Google’s Transliteration Technology – Saviour for beginners!

If you are a beginner with Hindi typing, you would probably want to use an IME with Phonetic key-character combination. For example, where “A” typed “अ”, R types “र” etc. It is easier than using other combinations where the mapping may be very arbitrary.

But you still need to learn the exact key combinations for typing something. If you need to type Pothi (पोथी) in Hindi, do you type “Pothi” or “Pothee” or “Pothii”. With most IMEs only one of these will work.

Google’s IME is different here. It works more intelligently. Instead of assigning fix keys to the characters, it guesses the correct word from the combination you have entered. Basically from the various words you could possibly write, it guesses the word based on grammatical correctness and frequency of use in languages. If it guesses the wrong word, you have a way to change it to different word. In Google Transliteration all three “Pothi”, “Pothee” and “Pothii” produce the same (and correct) word पोथी.

So, you can essentially type words and so long as it is close phonetically, this IME will find the suitable word for you. This makes it a great tool for beginners. You can get started right away, write Hindi the way you do while chatting with your friends or in SMS and start getting output in a Unicode compatible  font.

Google actually has an online service for this – http://www.google.co.in/transliterate . So you don’t even have to download and install anything.

All is not well here though. Once you start typing in Hindi regularly, you will start feeling the limitations of Google Transliteration. We will not get into the details here. But if that happens at some point, it may make sense to invest some time in learning another IME, which uses fixed combinations.

Complex Text Layout (CTL)

There is one major difference between Hindi (most Indian Languages) and English. In fact even between Hindi and Russian, Hindi and Chinese or Hindi and Japanese. The representation of a character changes depending on the context in Hindi and many other Indian languages. The representation of “द्”, for example is different in words तद्भव and विद्या. One has “द्” before “भ” and the other has “द्” before “य”. Compare this to English where how “d” is displayed does not depend on which letter comes before and after it. So, for displaying Hindi correctly the computer needs to understand all possible ways of displaying the characters under different contexts. The technical term for this is “Complex Text Layout”. Most computers with modern operating systems have this ability now and in all likelihood, you will not have to do anything special about it. But if you find a problem in display where a character is identified correctly, but is not displayed correctly, then you would know that it is an issue with computer not understanding “Complex Text Layout”.

In Windows XP and Vista, the complex text layout is enabled by default. In Windows 2000, you needed to enable it specifically. I have not tested it on Windows 7, but hopefully things should not go retrograde.

Finally

The description here is intended for a non-technical audience. Many concepts have been simplified and a purist technical person may be tempted to correct my usage of various terms (“You mean OS when you say computer!”). Let me just clarify that it is totally intentional. I just hope it has not become too technical for the non-technical audience

Questions are welcome as comments!

Some 50 years later, his son Shaleen Garg decided to re-collect the poems he regarded as the “most valuable property the family has” and publish the collection.

The dream is now a reality. The book “Vihaan” (a name that poet had thought of way back in early 1960s) was launched in Yamunanagar, Haryana in presence of more than 150 people. The vimochan of the book was done by Dr. Ramesh Kumar, General Secretary of Mukund group of educational institutions. The four hours programme also rightfully included a kavi sammelan. Some photographs are below. The book is available on Pothi.com.

We are announcing the launch of Pothiz – Pothi.com’s e-Magazine. Contributions are invited for the same. Selected entries will make it into the first issue of the magazine scheduled to come out in July 2009.

Details are available on Pothi.com’s website and submissions can be done here.

To start with the magazine will reach out to 2000+ people from our subscriber base and more!

So, all the existing and aspiring writers out there. What are you waiting for? Submit your entry right away! Let the creative juices flow.

And hey! Don’t forget to tell others around you about it.

When submitting their books the authors can specify certain portion of the book to be exposed for people to read online as “Preview”. We mandate a minimum of 10 pages to be included there. The idea is that most people publishing with us are first time authors. Plus the manuscript has not been vetted by a third-party. So, it is important that the potential readers get to see enough of the book to make a decision about whether or not to buy the book. We have put a minimum number there, because we feel that the exposed content should be enough to let users make up their mind about the book.

Some authors make good use of this feature. Let’s say you have written a novel. And you expose 60-70% of the novel, or even 90% of it on the site as “Preview”. What is it that you should be scared of? That people will read it for free and not pay for it? Consider this – if somebody actually reads 90% of your book, then he is probably sufficiently interested in it and would want to read the ending. He might end up paying for it. But if you circumvented the minimum 10-pages mandate by only exposing your table of contents and preface, the reader never had a reason to get interested in the book and hence would never consider buying it.

The logic will have to adjust for different genres and forms, of course. Exposing 90% of a short story collection will not have the same effect (it may still be useful for other reasons – e. g. the person may be induced to buy your next book). But exposing around 40% of the book would be worthwhile. Somebody who read 2 of your stories online, might be interested enough to pay for the remaining three too. Somebody reading only the preface and table of contents may never bother.

Similarly, one should expose at least one chapter (more the merrier) with substantial content for non-fiction. Don’t put “Introduction” and “Foreword” in the preview. If there is something about the book you want the readers to know “Description” is the section to do that. Make good use of “Preview” feature and put in an actual chapter in there. Let the reader find solution to an actual problem and decide that she wants to read the rest of the book too.

So, if you want to update the “Preview” of your book to make it more meaningful, here is the FAQ detailing how to update your book.

• Links to other books from the same category on Book Pages: As the number of books is increasing on the platform, discovery mechanisms are becoming important, so that potential readers can find books of their choice. We have started off with a simple feature in this direction. The book pages will now have links to few other books from the same genre. So, people interested in similar books can browse around.
• Fields for subtitle and ISBN: These were long due. There was no way for the authors to specify subtitle and ISBN for their books. Authors can go to their book pages, edit them and include these information.
• Introduction of Tags field on the book edit form: Tagging the content helps in search and discovery of the content. There is now a “Tags” field that authors can populate for their books. Once we have sufficient number of books tagged, we will expose them suitably.
• Setting MRP of the book, instead of setting the author margin: Till now, authors used to set the author margin for a book and the price of the book was calculated by our system. This was counter-intuitive to many people, who wanted to set the final price of the book. We have changed that system, so that people can now set the MRP of the book and author earning (royalty) is calculated by our system. It does not change the underlying price/margin relationship. Authors get the same earning for a given price as they used to get earlier. You can try out our new price estimator for the same. If you have used the price estimator earlier, you will notice that there are now two tabs instead of one. One of them called “For Yourself” lets you calculate the “Author Price” – the price at which authors can always buy the copies, irrespective of how they are priced on the store. The other one called “For Distribution” let’s you calculate the royalties at various MRPs. Again, the underlying logic has not changed. The earlier estimator also used to show you the author’s price apart from the store price. We have only rearranged the forms for the convenience of users.

Some more exciting stuff is in the making right now. Stay tuned for them