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CYBERCHATTER
Want
to co-author a book with Tara?
 A
round the middle of last year, firstandsecond.com got raves for being
India's amazon.com wannabe. Since then, as the blunt CEO of the on-line
bookstore, G.B.S. Bindra, likes to say, Amazon has moved into "selling
just about everything from dvds to kitchen appliances, WAP-enabled phones
and cars, while we've stuck to books". Bindra claims to have chalked
up half a million members and sold Rs 1.5 crore worth of books in the
past six months.
That's venture
capitalist territory. What clicks for me is the gimmick he plans to unfold
in the next few days. On January 23, Bindra launches Themotive.net, the
site for a collaborative, whodunit e-book written mostly by Tara Deshpande,
the attitude-laden, multi-talented lady from Mumbai who dabbles in everything
from acting and writing short stories and books to mouthing off-and baking
bread. (A recent e-mail raved about baking perfect loaves of dill, sugar
and garlic bread in Boston, where she now is: "When you bake your
own bread, you can do anything. Hit me baby!")
Tara writes
the first chapter of The Motive, which the site will post and you can
download for free. Readers write the second, she takes the thread on to
the third, and so on, until the seventh and final chapter she concludes
with.
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DOT
WATCH
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 Some
of the graphics go berserk-raindrops over text in the "climate"
section-but www.keoladeonationalpark.com, the site for
Bharatpur's bird sanctuary, should warm the hearts of any nature
buff.-
Oops. MAIT has lowered its pc sales projection for 2000-2001 to
1.75 million from 1.9 million last year. Reason: "sluggish
economy" and "depreciation of the rupee against the
dollar".
-
The Taj Group of Hotels has introduced WAP-enabled reservations
for its chain of hotels. The Oberoi Group and Welcomgroup chains
are planning to offer this facility as well.
-
The feel had to come back. At flipbrowser.com, you can download
FlipBrowser that lets you flip pages of e-books and other web
pages with virtual flipping of a page, with sound. Who said books
would die?
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It's a catchy
idea. I read the first chapter. It's pretty huge at over 18,000 words
but Bindra and Tara both say it's deliberate, to introduce a vast cast
of characters. There's Mehr Pagedar, a sharp, wealthy, hungry lawyer always
in search of the big break; and Mr Dhar, the "controversial"
politician who is discovered dead one morning. You get to figure out who
takes it forward, Mehr's loyal servant Teju, or Dhar's wealthy and warped
daughter Mrs Gorpode, or whoever else in the finite cast of characters.
If you do it best (Tara and bunch of editors choose) in 10 days, your
chapter gets uploaded, and then Tara has 10 days to finish her next chapter,
and so on.
It sprawls
a little too much for me but Tara says it's deliberate. "It's an
opportunity to share the creative process with every Tom, Dick and Harilal
Mithaiwala." She says a 20-year-old from Ahmedabad may not relate
to Teju as well as he might relate to Mehr while an army officer from
Shimla may be more comfortable with a CBI detective. "The characters
are the bait."
And the
play of the day is action. Tara gets paid an advance, 35 per cent of royalty
from pay per view downloads of the completed book and later, a paper and
glue shop-shelf version. You get a round trip-all expenses paid-to South-east
Asia if your chapter makes it. And Bindra is hoping for incremental visibility
and income that an estimated two lakh readers of the first chapter-and
more-can bring for an outfit that wants to make a big statement in a market
that organisations like Crossword and India Today Book Club wants bigger
chunks of. The biggest play for me is that it's new, and that makes the
Net more exciting.
By
Sudeep
Chakravarti
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METRO TODAY
