What Juggernaut Books’ app fiasco reveals about ‘mobile-first’ publishing in India
With the Juggernaut Books app discontinued and no communication from the publisher, readers remain in the dark about their digital library, which includes scores of books they had purchased
Juggernaut Books, the mobile-first publishing platform, burst onto the Indian publishing scene in September 2015 with promises of revolutionising the way readers engage with books. Co-founded by Chiki Sarkar, former publisher and editor-in-chief of Penguin Random House India, and Durga Raghunath, former vice-president at Zomato, the startup aimed to blend the digital and physical formats of books. Backed by a notable roster of investors, including William Bissell of FabIndia, Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, and Neeraj Aggarwal of Boston Consulting Group, Juggernaut set out to create a world-class Indian publishing company. However, within 17 months, Raghunath, who had termed Juggernaut Books as the ‘Netlfix of books,’ stepped down as its CEO.
The ambitious venture, fuelled by a $2.2 million (Rs 15 crore) seed fund, sought to tap into India’s mobile boom at a time when smartphone users were on the rise; by August 2015, their number had hit 159 million. Juggernaut aimed to shift the paradigm, prioritising mobile over print and targeting the largely untapped market for e-books, which accounted for a mere 7-8% of publishing revenue at the time. However, within three years of its grand launch, Juggernaut faced a stumbling block, The Federal has learnt. Though the publishing house continues to bring out physical books, the app, a vital part of its digital strategy, which went live in April 2016, encountered glitches that prompted a re-coding and upgrading processes.
Readers remain clueless
Even though the Wikipedia entry on the publishing house states the app was discontinued in 2020, it actually seems to have gone offline sometime in 2018, leaving readers in the dark about the fate of their digital library. Senior journalist Sugandhi Ravindranathan was among those who had bought several books on the app. But, to her horror, she found out, towards the end of 2018, that she could not access any of them. “I had been reading books that I had purchased through the Juggernaut app on my Xiaomi Mi Pad. On December 1, 2018, I found that I was unable to open the app. I wrote several e-mails to them, but instead of giving me a clear picture of what had been going on, they were evasive. After a point, they stopped responding to my mails,” she tells The Federal.
Ravindranathan, however, keeps getting promotional mails from Juggernaut. “Each time I get such mail, I assume things have been rectified. Imagine paying for something, but not being able to use it, and being instead showered with dodgy replies,” says Ravindranathan, who had been a well-wisher of the platform, buying several books and reading on her tab, which also has a Kindle app. When she could neither open the app nor update it, she uninstalled it in sheer frustration but found that she could not reinstall it either. That meant that she could not get a screenshot of the error. However, when she wrote to Juggernaut, explaining this, they failed to provide her with a clear answer or resolve the issue.
With no clarification from the publisher, and very little information available via news reports, readers continue to be clueless. “I used to enjoy reading books on juggernaut.in, the online platform that used to sell digital books. It has been a while since I visited their app or website. It seems the website is broken and so is the app. What happened?” wrote a user on Reddit seven months ago. Like Ravindranathan, this user, too, can’t access the Juggernaut website, which seems to have been ‘under construction’ for a while. Several other users The Federal spoke to said they have not been able to access the app on either Android or IOS devices. Like Ravindranathan, some of them had reached out to the company’s tech support, to no avail.
The freemium model
Juggernaut Books had launched with 100 titles (its line-up comprised 50 of its own books, and 50 from publishing partners, like children’s publishers Duckbill and Tulika Books), with the initial plan to publish 50 titles each year, with distribution and warehousing handled by Hachette India (it’s now being done by HarperCollins India). On its app, users could read classics by a wide range of authors, from Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain to Jane Austen. These books were available for free, with paid books starting at Rs 10.
Users could use Paytm or a credit/debit card to make payments. Purchasing a book by adding it to the Read section of the app let the users read the books, bookmark them, change the font size and background colour etc. Users could also add free books to their account. According to news reports, at the end of 2016, the app had more than 5,60,000 users and 1,80,000 book downloads. Its star authors included William Dalrymple, Sunny Leone (who wrote short stories), Praveen Swami, Rajdeep Sardesai, and Kanhaiya Kumar. Its six initial bestsellers included Twinkle Khanna’s first book of fiction, Pyjamas Are Forgiving, which topped its charts.
In a departure from conventional publishing, the company adopted a freemium model, keeping costs low for mobile books to encourage users to sample their wide range of books. It also roped in several prominent figures such as Aveek Sarkar of ABP Group, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, and D Sundaram (former CFO of Hindustan Unilever) as members of advisory board. There is talk that the company is trying to rebrand the app as Juggernaut eBooks. But its readers and subscribers do not know it yet.
In a written response to The Federal, the publishing house said: “The app has gone into re-coding and upgrading due to some glitches. It will take a while for the app to come back as it takes time to re-code it.” The Juggernaut story raises questions about the viability of mobile-first publishing in India and the challenges faced by startups attempting to redefine the traditional publishing route.