Strong consumer demand, high book prices, and easy access to illegal reproductions continue to fuel a thriving underground market.

A 24-hour police operation in Delhi has resulted in the seizure of over 20,000 pirated books and the arrest of a suspected repeat offender – the latest and most visible sign that organised physical piracy remains a serious structural problem for the Indian publishing market.

The Operation

Carried out this March by Delhi Police’s Crime Branch, the raids targeted multiple warehouses and an illegal printing press in Rohini, northern Delhi. The enforcement exercise was conducted in partnership with Penguin Random House India, Hay House, and Simon & Schuster India.

The accused, named in the press release as Jwala Prasad, has been arrested and a formal case registered under the Copyright Act.

Titles seized included works by Daniel Kahneman, Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, Simon Sinek, and James Clear – a roll-call that illustrates how squarely the piracy trade targets high-demand, high-margin bestsellers from both international and Indian lists.

The Wider Context

This operation does not exist in isolation. Pirated books are estimated to account for 20–25% of the total Indian market, with direct negative consequences for author royalties and publisher revenues.

Piracy networks now operate both online and offline, and pirated editions are increasingly exported beyond India to other parts of Asia, Europe, and North America.

The problem extends into educational publishing. Government data recorded an alarming 890% spike in seizures of fake NCERT textbooks in 2025, with nearly half a million counterfeit copies recovered across coordinated raids.

The View From The Beach

Strong consumer demand, high book prices, and easy access to illegal reproductions continue to fuel a thriving underground market.

India’s book sector – the sixth largest in the world and second among English-language markets – presents an inherently attractive target for criminal networks seeking to monetise that appetite at scale.

The Delhi operation is significant less for its immediate impact than for what it models: cross-publisher collaboration, intelligence-led enforcement, and sustained legal follow-through.

Whether this approach can be replicated consistently – and extended to online channels – is the question publishers in India now need to answer collectively.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.