IPP, Repro, Gopsons, Thomson and Replika attend round two of NBPC core committee meet

The meeting saw book print firms like Brijbasi Art Press, Gopsons Papers, IPP, Replika Press, Repro India and Thomson Press agree to scale up Indian book production.

Presently, India book exports stands at $225million as opposed to the world book export market of $ 40 billion.

The meeting began with Indranil Mukherjee of Thomson Press indicating a need for collective bargaining for paper, plates, inks and other consumables. He stated: "this takes up a majority of the cost. If we as a group of book printers approach the vendors and suppliers together, we can sweat the equity of our collective strength. This will help us to bring down our pricing."

According to Mukherjee and later Apoorv Garg of Brijbasi, pricing will be a key area of concern if India needs to compete against the Chinese book print counterparts.

Pramod Khera of Repro India set the meeting in motion when he presented a task-list of things on how to proceed with the Book City project. "It is important to set immediate goals, in order to fulfill the vision of reaching one billion dollars in the export book print market by 2017."

Khera added: "The strength of the Book City project will be to scale up; and bolster the capacity to fulfill the book printing needs of the world market."

The committee agreed upon putting up a united pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair to be held from 10-14 October 2012. Also, the core members will make a high-pitched presentation during London Book Fair from 16-18 April 2012 in which they will highlight the new avatar of the Indian book print industry.

In addition, the group will appoint a professional research agency that can ready and then present it to the three state governments which have expressed an interest in the project. A project management consultant firm will be appointed soon.

P Sajith of NBPC stated: "A united front and a collective representation will bring India on the map as a desired destination for book printing needs." The benefits, according to him, will act as a catalyst for the domestic book print market as well as to other book printers which possess the potential of fulfilling the export bookmarket needs.

A pre-operative corpus fund is being set up which will be shared by members of the NBPC core committee. Those from the core group who could not attend included Lovely Offset, Manipal Press and Multivista Global.

Prominent book printers who are willing to be a part of this will be approached. The next meeting has been scheduled at the time of BMPA's Print Summit 2012 two-day conference in Mumbai on 23 and 24 February.