NBT book publishing training course at Pune

Starting in the year 1996, NBT embarked upon a very successful initiative of providing training in book publishing through introductory and intensive courses of fortnight to one month in different parts of the country. Latest in the series was the course organized at Pune between December 6-18, 2010. Experts from various fields shared their experiences and provided practical lessons to the trainees. There were forty-four participants. The course was organized in collaboration with Marathi Prakashak Sangh, Pune.

Sumit Bhattacharjee, assistant director of NBT, who is the coordinator of these training courses, is of the view that such training programmes are very useful for various state publishing organizations and the aspirants who wish to enter this field. There is no institution which train human resources for such a huge industry which boasts of third largest in the world in terms of number of titles published in the world in English language. The situation of training in regional languages is still worse, that is why problems of regional language are taken up in these training courses.

In Pune training course, experts from various field including specialists in Marathi publishing were invited to speak on different aspects of publishing. Sridhar Balan spoke on structure of publishing house and editorial process. Arun Jhakade, shared his ideas on history of Marathi language and its problems and prospects, B N Varma explained the intricacies of developing a manuscript and GS Jolly introduced the importance of ISBN in the present day book promotion and sales. Avinash Pandit spoke on copy editing in Marathi language and gave practical sessions while Madhav Rajguru gave an insight into making of a dictionary and the use of spelling in Marathi. Sharmila Abraham gave practical lessons on copy editing of children’s’ books.

The participants were awarded certificates at the completion of the course. Next training course will be organized at Silchar from February 24 to March 8, 2011.