As a publisher of children’s textbooks, I have found the current global pandemic turning my world inside out. Over the past few months, we ...
As a publisher of children’s textbooks, I have found the current global pandemic turning my world inside out. Over the past few months, we – my team and I – have brainstormed ways in which the market for publishing textbooks will have to reinvent itself. The world is changing and so are its needs. Today, the mundane activities that schoolchildren took for granted – morning assemblies, annual days and everyday classes – seem but a distant memory.
Will there be a return to ordinary, busy school days? In the near future, at least, it seems unlikely. What does that mean for a publisher of children’s textbooks?
The revenue model of this business is much like farming: you till and sow and water throughout the year, but you reap the harvest once every 12 gruelling months. Textbooks are printed and marketed between October and January every year. By February, godowns are packed with lakhs and lakhs of books. Between March and April, orders start to come in for prescribed textbooks for schools across the country.
Those textbooks will then be delivered and paid for. Covid-19, then, hit us at harvest time, just as schools were wrapping up their previous academic year and planning the new...
