Sunny Leone is the new Charles Dickens. Do not get me wrong: the actor is not writing a novel about a poor orphaned child in Lokhandwala. But much like Dickens in 19th century, Leone is writing serialised fiction.If instalments of Dickens’ novels sold for a shilling every month on the streets of London, Leone’s story will reach your mobile phone at 10 pm sharp, when you have presumably had your dinner, retired for the night and could do with a short, steamy tale from the former porn star — for just Rs 7.Seven stories over seven nights. Each a three-minute read.That is how Juggernaut , a mobile-first publishing startup , founded by publisher Chiki Sarkar and Durga Raghunath , plans to put their books in your phone.It is a remarkable adventure in the Indian publishing world: giving prominence to digital books over physical books, and emphasising the always-at-hand cellphone — instead of the ereader that Amazon and others fetishise — as the primary reading device. It is an audacious attempt to challenge and change the old fundamentals.Inside Juggernaut’s rather tiny office, highlighted by a bright pink couch in ikat, in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat, 20 people — an equal number of editors and engineers — are hard at work in the days leading to the launch of the app on April 22. Sarkar, 38, says: “We are bringing two different cultures together — the tech culture and the publishing culture. We are going to up the game. We want a new future.”It all began in London, two years ago. Sarkar was at the London Book Fair, where she heard a data specialist talk about the cellphone novel craze in Japan and China The Asian cellphone literature story is quite something. In Japan, the phenomenon began over a decade ago, with writers writing stories as text messages on their phones and readers reading them in snatches on theirs. In China, as The Economist reported back in 2013, the internet has revolutionalised the publishing scene.Shanda Cloudary, China’s largest online publishing service, merged with Tencent, one of the largest internet companies in the world, to form the Yuewen Group last year. Its numbers are lip-smacking good: with over three million books, it expects to attract 100 million readers and generate over 200 million yuan ($30 million) annually.When Sarkar, then publisher of Penguin Random House India, came back to office from the London Book Fair, and asked if Penguin could put its entire commercial list on the phone, “they thought it was a really cool idea, but nothing happened”, she recalls.She quit in April 2015 and soon began to brainstorm with Raghunath. The 37-year-old, who was the CEO of Firstpost and senior vice-president at Zomato, has a couple of digital ground rules: “I hate digital being taken for granted. Things shouldn’t be dumped on the digital platform. Also, digital should not be free.”In Sarkar, she found the perfect partner. That is how Juggernaut began to take shape, not an online bookstore like Kindle or an elibrary like Scribd, but a tightly curated publishing house that is primarily on the app, along with 40-50 physical books that will be distributed by Hachette India.Game Changer How big a gamble is this? “The gamble is in the scale,” says Raghunath. “It is all about economies of scale. The bar of physical books is very low — (a print run of ) about 3,000 copies. We want to disrupt that metrics.The question is: How much can we push the metrics and averages up? India has 40-50 million news audience on the phone. How can we bring them in and make them pay for the reading experience?”“The gamble is in asking big, bold questions,” says Sarkar. “And I want to keep asking them.” The numbers are with Sarkar and Raghunath: there are over 220 million unique smartphone users in India, second only to China; and more people are reading on the phone than on the ereader.According to a consumer survey of 2,000 adults in cities for a one-of-akind AC Nielsen study India Book Market Report 2015, people read books 2.1 times a week on an average.Interestingly, 56% of the respondents bought at least one ebook a year and nearly half of these bought at least three-four ebooks a year, indicating a growing demand. This is a market that publishers are slowly tapping. Over 70% publishers in India produce ebook versions, says the India Book Market Report.However, as Thomas Abraham, MD of Hachette India that has made all its books available as ebooks, says: “Ebooks are a useful additional strand but not yet crucial to the Indian publishing scene.” He recalls Flipkart’s exit from the ebooks business in December 2015 to show how this is still an “add-on, niche segment”.“Ebooks’ numbers and revenues are still in their infancy,” says Abraham. “Ebooks are not being tracked officially so numbers are not clear but most publishers will find ebooks’ contribution levels coming in at between 5% and 10%.”Ananth Padmanabhan, CEO of Harper-Collins India, says, “Ebooks have been available in India for almost a decade, with the last few years seeing a significant spike both in device and consumption.Current ebooks market share is in the low single digits, but as the overall pie is growing steadily, so is this number.” Abraham explains that while the digital content has exploded in the educational space because of journals and whiteboard markets, on the trade (consumer) side, it has not picked up.“It is possible to get hits/views, the occasional record downloads and ebestsellers, but whether it is possible to run and sustain a profitable company driven primarily by a digital programme remains to be seen. Juggernaut is experimenting with this, and all of publishing will be rooting for them because if that model works, it could provide an alternative distribution channel for trade publishing in India.”Juggernaut is also disrupting many notions around the book: like the ideal length of a published book, the separation between the publisher and the reader, the distance between the author and the reader. Santosh Desai, MD and CEO of Future Brands, says, “It is a genuinely fresh take on publishing. Taking an old form and adapting it to a new format in this manner is audacious. Also, the book has been considered sacred, with a certain distance kept between the author and the reader. Juggernaut is delightfully flirting with these ideas.” While short ebooks have been like side dishes for most mainstream publishing companies, Juggernaut is going for 25,000-30,000 words for most of its ebooks. The prices are kept at Rs 49, Rs 99 and Rs 149.While you cannot buy and download ebooks directly from the Kindle app, the reading and buying experiences come together in the Juggernaut app. But rather inconveniently, you can keep only five books downloaded at a time on your reading shelf: you will have to delete a book to download another.Juggernaut looks to making ereading fun and social: it has light segments like bathroom read, long commute and night reads, allows readers to directly ask questions to the author and gives the option of gifting books to others — even anonymously, which can be a tad creepy.

Is this the Zomatofication of publishing? “I don’t know what that means, but if it means succeeding in the vertical commerce space, sure,” says Raghunath.

The app is a great concept. But content has to match the concept. “We are going for deeply commercial or deeply serious books,” says Sarkar. So along with Sunny Leone will be Hussain Haqqani and Arundhati Roy.Juggernaut is betting on celebrity marketing, interactions with the author and pricing to keep the reader in. “According to the contract, authors have to spend 15 hours responding to the readers in the first three months,” says Sarkar. “The authors gets real-time response from readers and know exactly how many times their books are downloaded,” says Raghunath. Juggernaut also gets very valuable realtime readership data: what books are being downloaded, how many people are opening a book, who prefers what, what kind of books, for instance, are women interested in.“I bring the books, she has to make it work,” says Sarkar, looking at Raghunath. Sarkar, who had an enviable roster of South Asian writers when she headed Random House India, has got click-bait names: William Dalrymple on Kohinoor, Arundhati Roy on her meeting with Edward Snowden, election strategist Prashant Kishor, Haqqani on India-Pak relations, Twinkle Khanna and Sharmila Tagore’s memoirs.The Missing Author Unfortunately, on Day One, none of these writers was up in the app and the reader got only slim pickings. Which is why what could have been a big-bang launch turned out to be a damper. Raghunath said there would be daily and monthly subscription for Rs 15 and Rs 299 respectively. Hopefully, that will be rolled out only when there is more to sample. Santosh Desai says it is too soon to judge Juggernaut on the specifics:“The intent is very interesting. The content will be filled as it grows.”The Indian reader is difficult to crack: one, she has been reading mostly for free online; two, she has to get used to online payment, as there is no cash on delivery for ebooks. The content has to be exclusive and exceptional.If readers begin to wonder whether “7E”, the first story by Sunny Leone about a researcher in gene therapy joining the milehigh club on a Bangalore-Delhi flight, is worth Rs 7, when they can read similar stuff for free online, then the cracks will begin to show. Juggernaut has a fallback option — the physical books, which will be launched about three weeks after a digital release. “All our digital books won’t be available as physical books, but a selection of them will be. We are an innovative company with a small conservative part to it,” says Sarkar. Even if the app fails to take off, “people will buy the books of Dalrymple and Arundhati Roy and Prashant Kishor,” she says.Juggernaut has already tied up with publishers like Westland, Yoda Press and Navayana. Hindi books will be launched in a couple of months and then “we will have simultaneous releases in Hindi and English”, says Sarkar.Juggernaut raised Rs 15 crore from Series A round, with former UIDAI head Nandan Nilekani and FabIndia MD William Bissell investing, apart from Boston Consulting Group India MD Neeraj Aggarwal and Sarkar’s father and media baron Aveek Sarkar. “We will go for Series B when we have seen the response to the app and fine-tuned it. For now, allow me to take chances,” says Chiki Sarkar. She and Raghunath are certainly ahead of the curve. The question is: will money follow them there?