Being a mid-sized, independent publishing house with enormous ambition, Roli Books has faced a few crises before. When no printer in India ...
Being a mid-sized, independent publishing house with enormous ambition, Roli Books has faced a few crises before. When no printer in India had colour presses we dared to print our books in Singapore. Before liberalisation, when the Reserve Bank of India made it extremely difficult to publish foreign language co-editions, we started a subsidiary in Holland. When there weren’t enough bookshelves to display our art and illustrated books, we opened our own shops. But today, during and after the lockdown, we are faced with adversity of a magnitude we’ve never witnessed before.
Illustrated books are considered a niche in the larger publishing industry. The print runs are conservative, prices high, and the typical time taken to publish one such book ranges from a minimum of a year-and-a–half to as many as five years for highly specialised projects. Space for such books is limited within existing bookshops, making it difficult for readers to discover the variety available in this genre. Yet, for forty-two years now Roli has stuck to its core competence of producing very high quality illustrated books.
At a moment when avenues for sale of print books are extremely limited, we face the same problems as all our peers in the book...
