‘Indian Noon’ at the London Book Fair

During the London Book Fair, a conference called the ‘Indian Noon’ will be held on 16 April to establish India as a hub for the book industry. It will be attended by leading international publishers.

11 Apr 2012 | By Rahul Kumar

Indian book printers will lure global publishers at LBF 2012

Top book print firms such as Gopsons Papers, International Print–o–Pac, Jayant Printery, Kalajyothi Process, Lovely Offset, Manipal Technologies, MultiVista Global, Nutech Print Services, Replika Press, Repro India and Thomson Press have confirmed their participation for this event. The participation is by invitation only.

The theme for this conference is ‘Discover Indian Bookonomics - Ability, Affordability, Adaptability'.

The conference will begin with a presentation by Pramod Khera of Repro India called "An overview of the Indian book print industry: today and tomorrow", this will discuss the changing face of Indian book printing industry. The presentation would be followed by a panel discussion.

The panelists who have confirmed are:

Neil Bradford, divisional production director at Random House.
David Murray, operations director for HarperCollins Publishers
David Hetherington, vice president for academic / educational merchandising and digital printing, Baker & Taylor

The underlined objectives for this conference are

To present the current strengths of India which can be exploited by some of the publishers who do not outsource from India.
To reveal the changing face of the Indian book printer, who is willing to invest in capacities and additional services.
Discuss the fast growing market for books in India, which could make sense for publishers to partner with Indian printers.
Send a clear message to the world publishing community that India is doing the right steps in addressing their requirements.
Understanding the challenges faced by the publishers in distributing content through various media and offer viable solutions/partnerships.
Networking with buyers and media partners.

The idea of this conference was proposed during the first of its kind National Book Printer’s Conference which was held at Thiruvanthapuram in November 2011. The aim of this conference was to know international trends and compare them with local experiences to bring about an understanding of cost efficient methods of book production.

"The Indian book print exports are negligible, even to the English speaking countries. This needs to change and the only way of doing this is through increasing interactions between the stake holders”, said Khera.

The London Book Fair 2012 will be held between 16-18 April at Earls Court, London. The exhibition will have over 400 seminars and events, 1,500 international exhibiting companies and 24,500 publishing professionals.