J. Venkatesan,    The Hindu

NEW DELHI: LexisNexis Butterworths of Britain has merged with leading law book publishers Wadhwa of Nagpur to play a crucial role in judicial and legal reforms in India.

Speaking at a function here to celebrate the recent merger of the two firms, Justice Altamas Kabir of the Supreme Court said that with the development of information technology industry and globalisation of laws, the legal and judicial fraternity in India frequently refer to legal developments and literature from abroad.

“There are different demands on the Indian legal system to cope with the changes and the content suite of LexisNexis Butterworths- Wadhwa Nagpur will aid in this process,” he added.

The Chairman of the Law Commission, Justice A. R. Lakshmanan, called the merger a significant development in the Indian legal industry. “Mergers and acquisitions sometimes happen between sick units but it is one of the rarest of rare events where two giants of the publishing industry have merged creating an entity that will be able to provide the best local and global content to the Indian legal industry,” he said.

Access to information

Delhi High Court Chief Justice A. P. Shah said, “As the Indian legal industry is expanding and the volume of cases and arrears in cases are increasing at a rapid speed, there is a need for easy access to information from various sources for providing speedy justice to the people. In Indian courts where case precedents are important, systematic and comprehensive archives and efficient law reporting can help lawyers and the judiciary to serve the people better.”

Commenting on the mega-merger, Robert Rigby-Hall, Senior Vice-President (Human Resources), LexisNexis Group and Managing Director of LexisNexis Butterworths-Wadhwa Nagpur said, “The combined company will help to provide richer, more comprehensive solutions to the Indian legal industry including integrated content from key markets such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.”

Significant value

The Wadhwa Brothers of Wadhwa Nagpur said, “The merger will add significant value to the Indian legal market and enable us to serve the global legal community’s interest in India more effectively.” Senior Supreme Court advocate K. K. Venugopal offered his felicitations to the new entity.

Tuesday - Feb 17, 2009

Televisionpoint.com Correspondent | Mumbai

Harvard Business School Publishing India (HBPI), the wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), is accelerating its Indian operations to offer ideas and solutions in a range of print and digital formats for Indian institutions of higher education, corporations and individual managers.

HBPI was launched recently with the aim of reaching out to the Indian market more directly and source local content and identify Indian authors for global audience.

“The aim is to generate content from within India and from among Indian companies and managers. There are a lot of breakthrough ideas here and there is a market ready to buy such ideas.” said Peter F McAteer, vice-president and managing director, corporate learning, HBP .

“The key is the compelling content that we need to create for corporate organisations and we are sure to find that in India, which is a great market to find companies that are doing interesting things,” Peter said.

One of the forthcoming books from HBP is India’s Global Powerhouses by Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing at the Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School. The book profiles India’s pioneering multinationals, describing their transformation from leading domestic players to evolving global giants, as well as their approaches to globalisation.

“We will not only assist corporations with understanding their learning objectives but also will work with them to develop and implement a customised portfolio of content uniquely suited to their talent development needs,” said Vinay Hebber, managing director, HBPI.

According to Vinay, HBPI has already started working with a few business schools where students of these schools can use unlimited amount of digital content at a price that is affordable to them. And the plan is to extend this offer to many more business schools in India

Chandigarh, March 18 (IANS) , www.yahoo.com

Despite a growing domestic market and increasing exports, Indian book publishers are concerned over the ‘invasion’ by their foreign counterparts and have demanded that the government scrap the foreign direct investment (FDI) in the industry.

‘We demand the government scrap the FDI in the business of publishing to give a breathing space to Indian publishers,’ Anand Bhushan, advisor and former chairman of the New Delhi-based Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), told IANS here.

The government allowed 100 percent FDI in book publishing in 2000. The domestic industry has been seeking a reversal of the policy ever since.

‘Foreign publishers have big capital and full support from their governments. They have badly invaded the Indian market and Indian publishers cannot compete with them,’ he said.

Bhushan, also joint managing director of Pitambar Publishers in New Delhi, said the domestic market was increasing every year but foreign players were eating into their profits in a big way.

Foreign publishers have invested around Rs.200 million (Rs.20 crore/$4 million) in India in the last 10 years and taken away profits worth over Rs.1 billion, he said.

Bhushan was in the city recently to head FIP’s 12th national convention that saw the participation of publishers from across the country.

‘Every year, over 80,000 new books are published in India. Hindi language books constitute the majority as around 25,000 books are in Hindi while about 20,000 books are in English, and the rest are in other vernacular languages,’ he said.

Asked about the threat of e-books, Bhushan said: ‘E-books have stormed into the market and they will certainly create their monopoly one day. But for the next 10 years, we face no threat from them as this technology will take time to make room for itself.’

According to official figures, book exports increased from Rs.800 million in 1998 to Rs.12 billion in 2008.

However, publishers are not impressed with the growth in exports.

‘Despite this huge figure, we stand nowhere in the international market. This figure is just a fraction if we compare it with the number of books exported from countries like the US, Canada, Russia and the UK,’ Harish Jain, owner of 28-year-old city-based Unistar Books Publishers, told IANS.

He said that the situation was not very rosy since ‘banks are not giving us loans as they do not consider books as a security’.

Even the government does not give enough importance to the publishing industry, he said. ‘In countries like Russia, there is a separate ministry of book publishing that takes care of publishers’ interests,’ Jain said.

Ramanjit Sandhu, a leading exporter of books to the US, said Indian books have high demand in the overseas market.

‘India exports books to 110 different countries and America has emerged as a big market of Indian books, especially based on Sikhism due to the presence of a large Indian diaspora there,’ Sandhu said.