The Hindu Business Line : Britannica puts India in focus

ENCYCLOPAEDIA Britannica (India) (EBI), which has just launched the 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite (URS), a collection of four CD-ROMs, is stepping up its India focus.

Speaking to Business Line here, Mr Aalok Wadhwa, Managing Director, EBI, said the company was increasing the core coverage of India and South-East Asia. EBI is also launching a CD-ROM of its Encyclopaedia of India next month. It is priced at Rs 995.

Mr Wadhwa said his company was bringing out encyclopaedias on Indian art from pre-history to the present, Indian history in two volumes and Hindi cinema. It is also producing CD-ROMs on various subjects, such as a lecture-demonstration of the sitar, which could find place in the various encyclopaedias produced by the company.

EBI claims an over 75 per cent share of the retail reference CD-ROM market, whose size is estimated at Rs 2 crore. Competitors include Microsoft's Encarta and smaller players such as World Book. So far, EBI's CDs were available mostly at IT shops and a few major bookstores but now distribution is being widened, and will include toy stores as well. About eight per cent of EBI's sales are made online. Another channel through which it sold its CDs were institutions such as VSNL, BPCL and Compaq, which offered it as part of their deals to customers.

Mr Wadhwa said EBI was expanding the target segment to include young children and students. The 2003 URS is meant for children as well as adults. He said it had been designed to make the most of the Indian market. Since low bandwidth and telephone charges are factors to contend with in Internet usage in India, the user's hard disk is updated every three months from EB's Web site. In the US, it is updated everyday.

Mr Manish Purohit, Executive Director and Head of New Media, EBI, said the speciality of the URS was that most subjects it contained could be used at different levels - elementary, student or adult. It also has a feature called Interactive Timelines which enables the user to locate events down the ages in a variety of subjects. Knowledge Navigator, an interactive browser, throws up a lot of associations in response to a search topic. The URS costs Rs 2,495.

Apart from encyclopaedias, EBI is also developing curriculum content for school and college students. It is now working on Science and Mathematics lessons, in print as well as CD-ROMs, for students from Classes VI to X. It is also putting together books on English as a second language and computer proficiency, apart from lesson and work books for students, and teacher guides, as it believes the publishing industry has to introduce more activity-driven study material, rather than those meant as examination aids.

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