It was a year ago this month that China’s content-sharing app SHAREit crossed the all-important 1 billion user mark, at that time with 300 million on board in India.
Fast forward a year, and now with 400 million Indian users, and India’s premier digital publishing outfit Juggernaut Books has partnered with SHAREit to deliver video trailers and other promotional material to the content-sharing app.
Juggernaut Books itself has notched up an impressive 1 million downloads since its April 2016 launch. The Juggernaut blog explains,
The partnership between Juggernaut books and SHAREit will enable the 400 million SHAREit users in India to access English & Hindi video summaries of their favourite Juggernaut books on the SHAREit platform. Interested users can then proceed to read the books on the Juggernaut app. SHAREit and Juggernaut will collaborate on a steady pipeline of books and continue to scale up the partnership to bring exciting content to the users.
Juggernaut CEO Simran Khara added,
We are thrilled about this partnership with SHAREit. We’re committed to getting more Indians to read and video summaries are a great way to inspire people to take the first step towards discovering great stories.
Jason Wang, SHAREit India MD confirmed there is,
growing consumer demand for contents to read on the go. Collaboration with Juggernaut will enable SHAREit to provide our users with an easier way to pick their favourite books to read through video summaries.
While Juggernaut has a focus on big name Indian authors like Twinkle Khanna, Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, Rujuta Diwekar, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Rajat Gupta, Kanhaiya Kumar and Sunny Leone, it also has a self-publishing arm.
Since May 2017 Juggernaut has been letting authors upload content to a segregated area of the Juggernaut platform and offering publishing contracts to those titles that showed promise.
So far 15 publishing contracts have been issued.
More exciting still is the prospect of film interest as Juggernaut develops its book-to-film pipeline. Juggernaut got its first movie deal in May.
Juggernaut currently fields over 10,000 titles, leading the way with digital book production and distribution in India.
Back in April HarperCollins added its catalogue to the Juggernaut app.
In a country of more than 200 literature festivals a year –
India’s “culture revolution.” 200 literature festivals a year as the Indian Renaissance booms
there is ample opportunity for publishers. In October 2017 India took over from the USA as the second largest smartphone market on the planet.
India surpasses US to become second largest smartphone market. Publishers should be excited
By 2020 India’s internet user base is expected to reach 760 million, not just more than double the entire population of the USA, but equivalent to double the entire populations of the USA and UK combined.
So it should come as no surprise that I view India as publishing’s brightest prospect.
