Blacktop Buccaneers

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Praveen Kumar, a stout, shabby-looking bookseller who squats next to his wares in a dingy corner of New Delhi's Connaught Place, prides himself on giving customers hefty discounts on their favorite British and American best sellers. The 45-year-old former bookbinder peddles American author Irving Wallace's The Fan Club for 110 rupees ($2.40), about 15% less than the publisher's recommended price. Of course, Kumar adds with a sigh, that's nothing compared with the discounts he offered in the good old days, before India's recent crackdown on pirated books. Kumar previously ran off dozens of copies of Wallace's novel at a friend's printing house in Shahdara, a neighborhood of East Delhi, carted them back in an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place and hawked them for 66¢ each. "Piracy is good for us booksellers and good for customers," he says. "But the publishers are now ruining everything."

In an age when intellectual-property theft evokes images of MP3 files being downloaded illegally from the Internet, Kumar and his fellow booksellers might seem like quaint throwbacks. Yet he and his colleagues remain the single biggest threat to India's book-publishing industry, which generates some $1.5 billion in revenues a year. You see them everywhere in Indian cities, perching on busy sidewalks hawking new editions of everything from pulp thrillers to the autobiography of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch to the latest novels from highbrow writers such as Salman Rushdie. Up to one quarter of all books sold in India are copies printed without the publishers' consent, according to Sukumar Das, president of the Federation of Publishers' and Booksellers' Associations of India. P.M. Sukumar, vice president of sales and marketing at Penguin India, estimates that piracy slashes his company's sales in India by 20%. "If the problem is unchecked," Sukumar says, "it will seriously harm the book industry."

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Publishers say that black marketeers simply stroll through bookstores in Delhi, the center of India's book trade, and buy best-selling novels and expensive educational textbooks, which they then photocopy and print in bulk in nearby cities such as Meerut. Production costs for paperbacks can be as low as 11¢ per copy—cheap enough to enable pirates to profit while undercutting cover prices of genuine versions by up to 70%. Though some pavement booksellers stick to selling legitimate books, others like Kumar say the knockoff trade is hard to resist because it's lucrative, demand for cheap reading material is high and local authorities can be paid to look the other way. Kumar says he bribes the police about $20 and New Delhi city officials $10 every month.

Many of the street-side booksellers are migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India's poorest states, and are almost illiterate in English. Yet they're surprisingly sophisticated where it counts. They master enough English to memorize a list of significant authors and identify them by their book covers; they're also highly attuned to the tastes of the Indian reading public. Diwakar, a 19-year-old book-hawker, rattles off the names of his top sellers with ease: "Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sidney Sheldon, John Grisham" and, of course, "Harry Potter." They also know that pirated editions of The Joy of Sex are always in high demand, as are copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Says street-side seller Vinod Jain, 21, who always keeps Hitler's book in stock: "I don't know why they want it, but it's a red-hot seller."

But the halcyon days might be numbered. The book industry has launched 300 raids on pavement sellers in the past two years, according to Das of the publishers' association. Kumar laments that because of the raids, he's been forced to become an honest dealer—with disastrous results for his bottom line: his daily turnover has dropped from about $85 to about $5. "I wouldn't say the problem is under control, but we're fighting back now," says Penguin's Sukumar.

Whether or not book piracy ends, one veteran of the street-side industry thinks the future is bleak. "No one's buying books these days," says Pramod Kumar (no relation to Praveen), who sells an assortment of books and magazines in Connaught Place. "They're all watching TV serials." After 22 years in the business, he says he's thinking of changing professions. With a grin that exposes two rows of blackened teeth, he confides, "The future is in CDs."