Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Indian language ebooks

With Tablet PCs on the rise, this year will see many Indian companies attempting ebook applications for Indian languages. At the recently concluded World Book Fair in Delhi, Rockstand (RockASAP Retail Pvt Ltd) had taken a huge stall, very nicely designed. Its press release appeared as news items in most of the Indian newspapers, through PTI. Sample this article in NDTV. The reader app is supposed to also handle Indian languages. However, investigation at the stall did not yield any useful information. The people in the stall didn't know much about this.

NDTV Gadgets has a review on this app, which you can see here. This review also states that the app has Indian language capability and also says the app is available for iOS. However, when I checked on appstore in my iPad, I couldn't locate it at all. However, the Android app works. I could download a free Hindi book. It works.

This Hindustan Times article gives an overview of various ebook service providers who were present (and not present) at the Fair. Amazon Kindle didn't have a stall. Google was not present. Amazon is not interested in Indian language ebooks at present. But Google is interested and was still not present with a stall.