Appendix 2 provides full transcripts of my interviews with publishers. The interviews are preceded by some factual details about each publishing house. The gist of these interviews is interwoven into one of the sections in “Publishers' Perspective”.

Transcripts have not been provided, however, for informal interviews conducted with:

Sahitya Akademi

The Akademi was set up in 1954 by the Government of India to meet the challenges of a multilingual society and foster the art and literature of the Indian people. The Akademi has been trying to meet this challenge in two ways: firstly by producing informative material regarding literary activities in all Indian languages and secondly by publishing translations of award-winning titles from one Indian language into another. The Akademi started off as a national organization that would, among many other things, subsidize the cost of books that normally do not interest private publishers. This noble, but perhaps unrealistic, aim had to be amended in the course of time because the private publishers never showed any interest in Sahitya Akademi projects. In the course of time, the Akademi had to start publishing and marketing its own books. At the same time, the pricing structure in Sahitya Akademi is different from that of private publishers. The Akademi does not take into account the cost of the preparation of a manuscript, i.e. the remuneration paid to the author/compiler/translator/reviser, because such expenditure as a part of the literary activities of the Sahitya Akademi, is treated as subsidy in the larger national interest.