Jaipur Literature Festival announces an interesting mix of sessions for BookMark

This will be followed with the second session of the day titled The Dynamics of Change which will see well-known publisher, Urvashi Butalia engaging in a discourse with John Makinson. The session will include discussions on how to manage the transition from an industry centred on the single copy purchase and ownership of a physical product to one dealing with a range of devices in which access counts for more than ownership. Bhutalia’s session will also seek how mobile media consumption habits will change the perspective and function of the publishing industry in mature markets of the West.

The first day of the conference also a see translations experts from around the world engage in a roundtable discussion over the history and geography of translation, with specific focus on the multilingual culture of India. The key speakers of the session will be Manu Dash, Vaiju Naravane, Minakshi Thakur and Kelly Falconer

The conference will up the ante on its second day with a series of interesting sessions. The first among these will be the session titled Giants and Game-changers. The session will discuss publishers can get benefits of scale and globalisation in an industry overshadowed by huge international players and establish innovative local synergies at the grassroots. The panel will include Paroma Chowdhury, Vera Michalski, Arpita Das, Paresh Nath, and will be moderated by Ritu Menon.

The second session of the day will discuss if the curated publishing model is passé and defunct with the emergence of an “avalanche” of content via blogging, self-publishing and other content models. For this, Meru Gokhale moderate the session and the panel will consist of Dayanita Singh, Margit Walso, Fiona McCrae. The session will also explore how the changes will affect the creative side of publishing and the intimate relationship that exists between the author and publisher.

In the evening, a roundtable discussion titled The Child’s Imagination, involving Manisha Choudhury, Margit Walso, Atiya Zaidi, M.A. Sikandar, Paro Anand and Payal Kapadia will try to re-enter the imaginative universe of the young mind and create books and applications that arouse curiosity and gains relevance for this market.

The third and final day of the conference will kickstart questioning the viability of physical bookshops, and how the new publishing models are moving away from window displays and rather concentrating on online models. The session titled Display to Discovery will be moderated by Mita Kapur and the panel will encompass Anuj Bahri, Paul Yamazaki, Vivek Tejuja.

The session will be followed with a thought-provoking views and fresh perspectives by Javed Akhtar and G Raghavender on the issue of intellectual property rights in the internet age. The session titled, Whose idea is it anyway, moderated by Manisha Chaudhry, will try to decrypt how ownership of ideas and the written text be best protected?

The conference will reach its conclusion with a roundtable conference titled Bottleneck in Indian Publishing. Leading names of the industry such as MA Sikandar, Bikash Niyogi, Ananth Padmanabhan, Ajay Shukla, Sandip Sen, Naresh Khanna, Aditi Maheshwari will discuss why despite being the major driver of South Asian publishing economy, what are the bottlenecks in credit support, distribution infrastructure and production that are hindering the natural growth prospects of the publishing industry.