Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Read India Books

This is an repost of an old blog entry, with some modifications, that I had posted long back in Random Thoughts.


Read India Books is an imprint of the social organisation called Pratham. The Read India books is a non-profit book publication that publishes extremely good quality books at affordable rates for kids of various age groups. I came across Read India Books through my friend, Prashanth. He also pointed me out to an blog entry regarding Read India Books by Sujatha.



Some of the books are a photo series(based on Ganga river etc), some are illustrations based on folk tales from around the world. Their books are categorised based on reader level (pre-school, early readers and Advanced readers).



One of the books that we bought for Sooraj is called The Turtle Story. It is a story about a Olive Ridley turtles that travels great distances to lay eggs near Orissa. No one really knows why Olive Ridley travel through seas to lay their eggs in the coast of Orissa - in and around a place called Bhitarkanika. This story is told from the view point of one of the turtles from its birth, through its travel through the seas, and finally laying eggs on the coast of Orissa. The book is available in many Indian languages including English, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Gujarati and Oriya. The book is authored by Kartik Shanker and illustrated by Maya Ramaswamy.



The illustrations are varied and quality of the books are extremely good. For another example, the book called 'Pehelwaan Ji' (originally published in Hindi and later translated into English) is a story of a proud wrestler brought down to earth by a small boy. All the illustrations in this book are in black and white. Sooraj uses it as a multi-purpose book. It is used as a story book as well as a colouring book. All this for a price of Rs. 15/-(less than 50 cents). Unbelievable.



Similarly, they have a wide variety of books in most of the Indian languages at very affordable prices. The price of the books range from Rs 15/- to Rs.25 or Rs.30/-. I highly recommend them for their quality, price and interestingness.



The vision of Read India Books is creating high quality, low cost books in Indian languages for children. And they've definitely made great strides towards this wonderful goal. One could also support them in many ways - Check out their Contact Page to help them out in achieving their goals.

4 comments:

Praba Ram said...

Hi Sathish -

Coincidentally, I was in fact thinking about Pratham Books/Read India Books just this week, and you have it going...! Great! We often talk about Tulika here, and I think Pratham/Read India books needs a lot of support as well - two nonprofit publishers!

These weird coincidences simply amaze me....We all share a passion here for children's books, and end up researching along the same lines. that's the bottomline!

We have a small collection from Pratham - The Magic Key series. I just pulled out those books out of K's bookshelf two days ago, and have it on my desk! Well, look out for the reviews soon...

good one!

praba

mommyof2 said...

can you get these books in USA? I mean, I can ask them but just wondering if any of you ordered for here?

Anonymous said...

Telugu book reveiw
http://conundrum007.blogspot.com

Gautam said...

Hey!

Just to let you know that Pratham Books is now blogging too...

http://blog.prathambooks.org/

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