In India, Education and the Government Drive the Publishing Market

At the recently concluded 43rd edition of the New Delhi World Book Fair, held from January 9 to 17, the big names in the publishing world were hard to miss: Cambridge University Press, HarperCollins, Random House, Sage, Scholastic, and Taylor & Francis, for instance, had prominent booths. The companies were attracted by the size of the Indian book market, which is estimated to be the sixth largest in the world (valued at $3.9 billion, according to Nielsen), and the second largest in terms of English-language publishing (after the U.S.). The major force leading the Indian market is educational publishing, driven by the third-largest higher-education system in the world.