MUMBAI — A call center worker far from his native Hyderabad; a Chennai-based developer checking out e-books in Tamil; and a young, homesick cab driver in Mumbai who keeps track of comings and goings in his village in Uttar Pradesh — all are customers of a mobile news application trying to tap into a growing market of online Indian-language readers.
NewsHunt, which can be accessed on smartphones, delivers 100 newspapers and 10,000 books in 11 Indian languages and English. It was started in 2009 by its parent company, Verse Innovation, to serve the growing literate population — 74 percent of India, according to the latest census.
In December of 2013, NewsHunt began offering its readers a selection of 10,000 books, adapted for mobile reading, in nine Indian languages and English.
But Virendra Gupta, the chief executive officer of Verse, said that while 70 percent of its users are bilingual — accessing newspapers in both English and an Indian language — they tend to read Indian languages eight to nine times as frequently as English content.
Umesh Kulkarni, an engineer at NewsHunt, and who studied Marathi, the language of his native state of Maharashtra, sees an emotional pull on customers in the product.
“When you read something in the language you grew up talking, it’s very appealing,” he said. “Someone asks ‘kasa ahe?’ in my script, my language, versus ‘how are you’ in English, I respond differently because there is implied intimacy in Marathi for me.”
NewsHunt has a significant potential customer base to tap. In India, newspapers are growing, and so is digital media, according to the Indian Readership Survey. In 2011, Indian media consumption grew by 3.2 percent, and Indian Internet users by 46.7 percent, according to the survey. International media companies have recently lined up to serve the English-speaking readership, which is a small piece of the population.
According to a December 2012 report by McKinsey and Company, India has the third-largest Internet user base in the world — about 120 million Indians go online every day.
According to NewsHunt, roughly 50 million people have NewsHunt on their smartphones. About 11 million are active users, NewsHunt said. The newspaper content is free for readers. For most e-books, users have to pay.
Vishal Anand, the chief product officer for NewsHunt, said NewsHunt users have downloaded 2.5 million books from December to May. Just 13 percent of those books are in English. Their best-selling book, “Chanakya Niti,” a treatise written over two millennia ago by a political economist in the ancient university of Taxila, in present-day Pakistan, sold 30,000 copies.
The company behind NewsHunt believes that this market is ripe. The December 2012 McKinsey survey reported that the number of Internet users could grow to between 330 and 370 million by the end of 2015.
Newspapers give full access to their feeds of stories to NewsHunt for free. The company splits the advertising revenues with the newspaper.
NewsHunt receives e-book versions of each book they sell from the publisher, and when none is available, some of the roughly 80 developers on staff type the entire book into a mobile-compatible format by hand.
While revenues have tripled in the last year for NewsHunt, the business has yet to turn a profit.
“Everything is put back in the business,” said Virendra Gupta, the founder and chief executive officer of Verse Innovation. “We are very focused on penetrating the market.”
Mr. Gupta said that more that profits right now, they were looking at gaining users at where the growth in mobile Internet in India would likely be.
“Mobile Internet is happening, smartphones are getting cheap, and your English speaking mobile Internet users will tap out at 100 million,” said Mr. Gupta. “If mobile Internet grows to 400 million, it will be on local languages. So we are building up for the future.”
Piyush Prabhat, the director of Prabhat Publications, which mostly publishes Hindi books, said that one of his company’s books, “Master English,” was barely selling, but after being on NewsHunt, “Suddenly, 7,000 people bought it.”
Amish Tripathi is the author of a trilogy of English-language novels based on the imagined mortal life of Shiva, a Hindu god, that sold two million copies, including many in various translations, according to Mr. Tripathi’s website.
“Distribution is such a challenge, which is why what NewsHunt is doing is so important,” Mr. Tripathi said.
Mr. Anand is careful to qualify the praise — the 100 publishers they use is only a dent in the thousands of publishers that exist in India.
Chiki Sarkar, editor in chief of Random House India, said this shift to reading books on mobile phones is inevitable. “NewsHunt seems to have made an impact on regional literature. E-books on smartphones is the way it’s going,” she said.