If we’ve ever talked about India and books, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with One Night @ The Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. I first read it and wrote about it when I was in India last year, and it’s stayed in my head ever since.

One Night @ The Call Center is about a bunch of young, over-educated kids working in a call center in Gurgaon (which is, trying desperately not to deviate, the new Chiba). Over the course of a single night, they debate issues ranging from arranged marriages to self-harm, industrial relations to globalisation. Then God calls, literally. The Wikipedia page has a good summary, written, charmingly, in Indian English.

You can’t underemphasise the success of this book. It’s the biggest selling English-language book in India. That’s India, a country of 1 billion people, where roughly a quarter are English users, making it technically the second largest English-speaking population in the world, although there are many debates to be had about literacy. What’s not in doubt is that literacy is improving rapidly, with new readers arriving all the time, in their tens of thousands.

One Night @ The Call Center has sold more than a million copies, and you can bet each one of those has been read more than once.

There’s lots of interest here. Bhagat single-handedly created this audience, gambling that there it was there, that kids with the same background as him, hard workers, IIT / IIM aspirants (if not graduates), English speakers, wanted, needed these stories. That the publisher, Rupa, one of India’s oldest home-grown English language publishers, took a gamble on the book. That Bhagat insisted on it being sold for Rs 95, rather than the usual paperback Rs 300 – 500. That it has failed in every other country its been published in, and the movie based on it failed too.

But what’s interesting to me is the tone of the book; what it’s about. Bhagat took out the flourishes before publication (“I realised I can’t be Arundhathi Roy”). It’s defiantly unliterary; it’s unfailingly direct. It’s polemical. Don’t kowtow to your boss, your family, to society. Be the best you can be; for yourself, for your friends, for India (particularly for India: self-determination goes hand-in-hand with nationalism).

First thing I did when I got to Delhi this time; go look for imitators. They had to be there. They were. The one that came to hand was Anirban Bose’s Bombay Girls, Bombay Rains. The formula is the same, if a bit closer to Bhagat’s debut Five Point Someone than One Night…. Five friends (in this case, medical students), a transformative experience, the state of the nation. Characters are dropped in as mouthpieces, shamelessly. The army captain who rages, unexpectedly, against the government: “Democracy doesn’t work at gunpoint. People have to want to be Indian. India is too diverse, too big, to let a few elected representatives and mindless bureaucrats sittlng in Delhi tell everybody else how to think.”

I’m loath to comment too much as an outsider. I know far too little about India, as much as I want to, to comment too much. But these books feel so extraordinary. Young Adult novels, reviled by the literary readership, about the real world, not about vampires or wizards or ponies or socialites. Bose’s editor told me that there’s a huge wave of these books, selling in huge numbers, and they still don’t understand their appeal. Hmm.

They respect books in India, in a way we don’t any more, in Europe and America. They’re also hyper-connected. I want to say something about Network Realism, but I can’t, yet. But these books are big, and getting bigger, because they’re about the specific place, at the specific time, speaking to a specific generation, in their own voice. There is something extraordinary there. That they don’t work as movies or outside India just highlights that.

The books are all in English. “There’s no good writing in Hindi any more”, say my educated friends, “Hasn’t been, for 30 years”. I don’t know if they’re right, but they would know. They lament this, up to a point. Indian English is not my English. It’s not written for us.

Obama was just in India. They were pleased to see him, but they’re aware it’s political, aimed at China. That’s where we think it’s at, for the next century or so: The World’s Largest Democracy (™) versus The World’s Largest… Everything Else—Bhagat himself has a less oppositional view. Time Magazine just called Bhagat one of the 100 most influential people in the world, which is stupid and not wrong at the same time.

I read a number of other books and a lot of other media in the last two weeks. Even the editors of these books don’t understand my or anyone else’s interest in them. But but but. Bhagat has 225k Twitter followers. How could you not be interested in what the kids in India are interested in?

More soon.

Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.

About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about Amazon, because Apple aren’t in the content game, and Amazon definitely are. And if Apple swoop in and solve ebook distribution like they solved (legal, paid-for, mainstream) music distribution with iTunes, then great. Amazon are having a pretty good crack at that with Kindle too, but I’d like to see more involvement from someone without such an aggressive history of pressuring publishers until their bones show (although I’m under no illusions), and Apple have a history of producing devices and interfaces that make people go “Oh, OK. I get it now. Neat.” Amazon are also showing signs of a more open, mulitplatform approach (iPhone app, epub, etc) but that’s another conversation.

Publishers have been confused about their roles for some time. And I’m trying very hard not to be inconsistent on this, because I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books. I’d like to have seen more happen in the last few years, but if it hasn’t, we should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy because a lot of book apps (such as booksinmyphone‘s Java apps) are really just wrappers for the text.

But by creating multiple versions of books – rather than agreeing on a single format (e.g. but not necessarily, ePub) and building separate software to display that – we’re heading down a road of locked-down, device-specific book technology that is antithetical to the nature of the medium, and costly to publishers. If only those publishers that can afford to spend the time (not necessarily money, the time alone has a cost) creating huge ranges of different applications can get their books onto the marketplace, it won’t be the rosy future for niche literature that some versions of the ebook story predict.

The sheer replication involved – reproducing the same lines of code over and over again for each book in a library – bothers even my low sense of efficiency and programmatic elegance too.

Of course, this development is not of the choosing of anyone in books. It’s a short-termist, technological hack, to get books onto closed platforms like the iPhone and other smart phones, and in large part it’s caused by the development of the App Store, which provides us with a sneaky way of getting book texts onto phones while there’s no equivalent of the iTunes Store for text files. But I’d much rather see a Book Store selling files to be read by standalone ereader apps than this glut of mini-apps.

Such a path would not prevent publishers building their own, branded and self-promoting, ereader apps, as I’ve previously suggested, but it would massively widen the interoperability of ebooks and ereaders, which readers will only thank us for. Perhaps we should be looking at some other hacks instead?

The former is definitely better, and the reader of choice so far appears to be Lexcycle’s Stanza, an open epub reader that’s loosely tied to FeedBooks, enabling you to pull down a bunch of free ebooks directly, or search for a whole lot more. Getting ebooks (or any other files) onto your iPhone/iPod Touch is not easy however, which is where the standalone books come in.

AppEngines currently have a whole bunch of these in the App Store – the usual assortment of out-of-print classics and weirdness. They’ve swamped the Entertainment category, in fact, to the extent that they’ve posted an apology on their site: “We share your concerns that our ebook applications are taking up too much space in the App Store. … We will not submit any more books until the situation is resolved.”

No such apology from ZappTek however, whose Legends series of books are also highly visible in the App Store Entertainment category. But wait, closer inspection shows that all these books are by one author: Michael Stackpole.

So what’s happened here is that a single author (or friend of) has got a stranglehold on new, accessible literature on the iPhone. The iPhone is currently the most sought-after piece of tech on the planet. It stands a very good chance of leapfrogging the frankly rubbish Kindles, Iliads and Sony Readers of this world to become the default ereader of choice. And one man has seen that, and done something about it. It’s the literary equivalent of shouting FIRST! in the comments. I think he kind of knows it too.

Anyway, for chutzpah, genius, foresight: booktwo salutes him.

… and wonders why if it only takes one guy to craft a pretty good ebook delivery system *in time for the App Store’s launch* and get it out there, how long before some publisher fulfills their responsibility to the authors and readers, and does something similar? We want to read people, and while I have a lot of respect for Mr Catchpole, Serpent on The Station isn’t really my thing, but, as Peter’s noted, what else is there?