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Books for children are doing brisk business SO you think children these days are simply not reading as much as they did in the past? The publishing industry doesn't seem to think so. They say the recession period saw the sale of children's books go up and make profits.
Shantanu Duttagupta of Scholastic India Pvt Ltd said: "It's a misconception that children these days are losing interest in books. If that were true, we wouldn't have published the number of books that we do every year and wouldn’t have made profits during the recession period last year!" "We publish around
80 new books every year. Overall, there are roughly around 1,500-2,000
children's books published every year in India. The children’s books
publishing industry is thriving," Duttagupta said, while
arranging a few books at Scholastic India's stall at the recently
concluded New Delhi World Book Fair. "If you ask my
personal opinion, I don’t think kids are not reading. We have seen a
big jump in the number of people registering in our readers club over
the last few years," Chandra said. According to Duttagupta, one
of the main reasons why the children's book industry remained
unaffected during the meltdown was the absence of "fear" in
the kids' minds about money. "Books based on latest TV shows like Hannah Montana, on movies like The Golden Compass, Ben10 and the like are very popular and we are catering to that market. Also, there is this book called Captain Underpants, which has a lot of grammatical errors but kids simply love the humour and the mistakes, parents, however, discourage their children from reading it," Duttagupta said. These may be the books
that kids love, but the genre that sells the most is educational
reference books. Duttagupta added:
"Reference books do so well because parents buy them for their
kids and not necessarily because kids like reading them!" —
IANS
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