Update: In conversation with MediaNama, Vishal Mehta, CEO of Infibeam said that the digitization services being being offered by Infibeam are available as both free and paid services: the free digitization service will involve Infibeam getting exclusive online and physical distribution rights of the books, which will be sold on a revenue share basis; he declined to specify the revenue share, saying only that upwards of 50 percent will go to the publisher or author. Infibeam has created Optical Character Recognition software for all 22 official languages in India: "They're not perfect, and it's hard to get above 95% accuracy on scanning, depending on the print quality." Thus, they need manual intervention for checking and correction. He believes that the demand for digitization for textbooks will be greater. For the digitization into ebook format, they will target local publishing houses, and expand it to magazines and journals as well. Infibeam has over 100,000 ebooks, but of its overall sales, ebooks are in the single-digit-percentages, but the advantage, Mehta says, is that ebooks help reduce the print cycle and time to market, with the current time to market for a manuscript being close to 1.5 years. The pricing of the ebooks will be consistent with print. In terms of rights management of the ebooks, they can narrow it down to the country level, based on the country in which the credit card used for purchase has been issued. Distribution of physical books in India is according to zones (North, South, East…
