Tata Group’s retail firm Trent Ltd today said online retail giant Amazon has picked up 26 per cent stake in its publishing arm Westland for Rs 9.5 crore.

Trent Ltd also owns the Landmark chain of bookstores in addition to Westland, which has published some of India's bestselling authors, including Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik.

“We are delighted that our investment in Westland will help their authors reach a broader audience worldwide,” said Sarah Jane Gunter, Director of Amazon Publishing, in a press release. “Our investment in Westland continues Amazon's commitment to innovating and investing heavily on behalf of customers in India – it’s still very much Day One.”

Westland has made rapid strides in the last few years, focusing on commercial fiction. With an aggressive marketing strategy and the financial cushion provided by rainmakers like Tripathi's Shiva trilogy, it managed to get on board bestselling author Anuja Chauhan last year, who parted ways with HarperCollins India after eight years and three books.

The collaboration with Amazon is seen as the culmination of Westland's financial strategy: it's clear that the distribution channel will receive a shot in the arm. What is unclear is the nature of this advantage. It could be in terms of pricing (it's well known that Amazon wants a $9.99 price ceiling on all e-books), superior visibility on amazon.in or something else entirely.

International publishing consultant Jaya Bhattacharji Rose said, "I don't know about differential pricing, but Amazon is discovering that they need to have more than just an online presence. Their Seattle-based publishing programme, its translation imprint AmazonCrossing in particular, is doing well. I suspect Amazon's presence (as a collaborator with Westland) is part of a carefully planned, multi-strategy programme. Bookshops in India are now saying that Amazon has approached them, looking for a partnership. They recently started a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle. It is speculated that they will open another 400 in the US."

AmazonCrossing, the translation imprint Rose spoke about, could also come into play soon. After all, one of Westland's recent masterstrokes was its extensive translation of the Shiva trilogy into several major Indian languages: this is one of the reasons why no series of books has sold more copies in India. The Assamese version of the first book (The Immortals of Meluha) won a Sahitya Akademi Translation prize last year.

Indian publishers will be following Amazon's next moves keenly. As Rose said: "Throughout their 20 years in the business, they have kept on evolving with the times... they have changed the industry."

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