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Unsurprisingly Storytel CEO Jonas Tellander understands this, and the launch of Storytel in India was not so much a gamble as a dead cert long-term investment. Yes, under the pay per page/minute model unit returns are lower than à la carte retail royalties can deliver, but the reason savvy publisher flock to unlimited subscription is the volume potential. The same principle underpins the subscription model. They survive by selling lots of books at the best price they can get.Īnd in a country like India volume can more than make up for comparatively low unit returns. That is to say, no author or publisher survives by simply by selling books at the best price they can get. Of course not all of these online Indians are interested in books, and those that are will expect to pay prices western publishers will balk at, but the secret sauce of publishing is the understanding that it’s not about unit values but volume. India may be only at 54.2% internet penetration, but with a population of 1.4 billion that 54.2% equates to 755.8 million people online, a market of internet users more than twice that in the USA. It’s current dominance of the ebook market through the Kindle India store owes as much to Flipkart’s ebook u-turn as it does to Amazon’s pursuit of the Indian reader. In the battle for India’s ever-growing internet consumer market Amazon has often shown itself to be behind the curve. For the literacy-challenged emerging markets the USP Tellander has latched on to which western publishers appear oblivious to, is the game-changing reach audiobooks bring to internet-savvy people around the world who have never learned to read but come from rich oral-storytelling traditions.