Ideas versus Execution: Which Side of the Equation are You on, and Why?

Gautam John talks about his work at Akshara Foundation and Pratham Books on the TED Blog.

Once an Intellectual Property lawyer that guarded knowledge, Gautam John is now dedicated to radically improving access to information. From open-source children’s books to collecting and analyzing school performance data, Gautam works to bring systemic change to India’s education system through a freer flow of information.

You have been a lawyer, an agriculturalist, an entrepreneur, and more. What first got you interested in working in education?

I was fortunate to have an absolutely brilliant education, going to some of the best schools in Bangalore. It wasn’t until I started working that I discovered my experience was far more an aberration than the norm in India.

Because I had done a lot of work previously with an agriculture-based business, where I went out to rural areas and dealt with farmers, I soon realized that education was something I’d taken for granted. The more time I spent in rural India, the more I realized how important education is. Education allows people to make a choice. It allows people to change jobs, and gives people flexibility to do different things.

I wanted to do something in the education field that was larger than one child, one school, or one cluster of individuals or institutions. I wanted to do something that was able to bring about systemic change.

How does your work with Pratham Books and Akshara Foundation help you work toward that systemic change?

Both organizations have these really large, ambitious goals. The mission statement for Pratham Books is “A book in every child’s hand.” I used to be an avid reader as a child and I know how important reading can be to a child. Akshara’s mission is “Every child in school and learning well.” Both organizations have allowed me to take on these goals using practical tools.

There are already innumerable children’s books in print in the world. Why is Pratham Books’ work publishing children’s books so important?

There are two issues there. One is that the Indian market is multilingual. We have 21 constitutionally recognized languages. There certainly aren’t a sufficient quantity of quality books being produced in these 21 languages.

The second issue is just the sheer number of books being published. For roughly 300 million children, we don’t produce many books. For every child in India, there is roughly one-twentieth of a book published. In the United Kingdom, there are six books produced for every child. So there’s a huge gap between the variety of languages of books being published in India, and the sheer number of books being published.

What’s going on behind the scenes at Pratham Books?

We’re trying to build an entirely new publishing model. The reason Pratham Books was set up was simply because there weren’t enough low-cost, high-quality children’s books in multiple Indian languages being published.

We’ve been working with interesting licensing models. We build community with technology to grow the number of titles that are distributed in the country, and to grow the quantity and variety of books produced. We also utilize it to publish in new languages, to publish in new formats and new mediums, and also to be more inclusive — that is, publishing for children who would otherwise not have an opportunity to read, like the visually impaired and blind.

The model has two components: online and offline. For the large part it’s online: we use pretty much all digital content.

We publish seed content online and use Creative Commons license. Then the online community creates the magic. It translates our books into French and Italian and Spanish and Assamese and languages that we don’t publish in. It converts it into iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle versions, and in to Braille.

We also have the offline community that acts as a sort of free agent of bridges between the online and offline community. They find places that need books and they help take this digital content and translate it into physical forms.

How does your offline community reach people who need books?

We’ve been working on some different models. We’ve been working on using post offices, trains and rural malls to see if we can use them as points of distribution. We’re starting an experiment with a cell phone provider to see how we can push content out via cell phones. As everyone keeps saying, 500-odd million people have cell phones in India, which is over 50 percent of the population.

We’re always trying new models. About a year or so ago we tried to see if we could use vending machines to sell our books at train stations and bus stations.

You were instrumental in bringing about an open-access business model at Pratham Books. Is it really a money-making model?

It’s surprising, right? We’ve been experimenting with this model for two years now. Our sales have actually gone up over 50 percent every year. The market is so vast. In India, giving away your content for free does not affect the largest part of your market, which is not online. The books are priced at cost or just under cost.

Even when the content is online, there is something about reading books in the printed form. Because we do it in such scale, we’re able to price it at very low costs.