Digital storytelling platform Pratilipi to offer Indian language e-books via Flipkart

(Representational image: cdd20 via Unsplash)

Digital storytelling platform Pratilipi on December 2 announced a distribution tie-up with Walmart-owned e-commerce marketplace Flipkart to expand its user base in hinterlands of India.

Through this partnership, Flipkart will offer fiction and nonfiction e-books across multiple genres like romance, horror, self-help, and motivation among others across 12 Indian languages.

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This includes bestseller titles such as Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam and Arun Tiwari's Wings of Fire, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking.

Users can buy the e-books including novels, short stories and series from the books category on Flipkart, following which they will be sent an unique code on email, which they can use to read on Pratilipi app.

In a statement, Pratilipi said that the larger vision with this collaboration is to eventually create a strong ecosystem of regional literature across various formats with amateur as well as established authors from its ecosystem that includes Pratilipi Comics, Westland Books, and IVM Podcasts among others.

"The driving idea behind Pratilipi is essentially access. Joining hands with Flipkart, we believe that together we can build one of the biggest content libraries in regional languages and make it easily accessible to audiences that like to consume content in regional languages" said Pratilipi co-founder Ranjeet Pratap Singh.

Pratilipi, which counts South Korean gaming giant Krafton and Omidyar Network India among its investors, claims to currently have around 25 million monthly active users.

The startup claimed that over 9.5 million have been published on Pratilipi to date with 500 million reads every month. Daily active users currently spend 90 minutes per day while premium subscribers spend around 3 hours per day, the company said.

In July, Flipkart had struck a similar distribution partnership with audio streaming service Pocket FM to offer the latter's audiobooks library to its customers.

"While more and more people adopt technology as the way of learning and storytelling, it is our endeavor to cater to their evolving needs. With this development, we will reach our customer base of 450 million people and fuel their passion to read across over 12 Indian languages" said Kanchan Mishra, business head, FMCG, home and general merchandise, Flipkart.