Publishers
Kottayam is home town of DC Books which took birth in 1974, and today is among the top ten publishers in India and is the leading publishers in Kerala with a market share of nearly 80 percent. Shri. K.R. Narayanan, Honorable President of India was pleased to inaugurate the Silver Jubilee Celebrations of DC Books on 8th August, 1998.
With D.C. Kizhakkemuri at the helm, almost all the works of prominent authors in Malayalam and those of new talents are brought out by DC Books. It also publishes well known Indian and foreign authors in Malayalam language.
Freedom at Midnight by Dominic Lapiere and Larry Collins, Road Back to Nature by M. Fukuoka, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcica Marquez, India: Midnight to the Millennium by Shashi Taroor, Sunstone by Octavio Paz, Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca are some of the major translations brought out by DC Books.
Among Prominent Indian authors are Rabindranath Tagore, Tara Sankar Banerjee, Ranjit Desai, Satyajit Ray, etc. in 1995, it started publishing Disney Publications in Malayalam, the first venture ever in an Indian language. DC Books, is also the publishers of the largest selling bilingual dictionary in India - T. Ramalingam Pillai’s English-English-Malayalam Dictionary. The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize Winner is the recent publication.
It has got co-publishing projects with Cambridge University Press, Mahatma Gandhi University and leading publishers like Penguin India in English. Akhila Vijnjana Kosam, a 4 volume desk encyclopedia, brought out by DC Books in 1988 is the first of its kind in Indian language. Now it is on the work of a new edition of the same giving special emphasis on Science and Technology. It is also publishing a CD-ROM Version of the encyclopedia in Malayalam, the first Multimedia Encyclopedia in an Indian language.
At present DC Books, together with Current Books which became its sister concern in 1977 and having over 60 percent market share of general books sales (English and Malayalam) in Kerala, operates a chain of 23 branches including one in New Delhi and 55 agencies is the largest publishing/sales network in the State. In total about 70 percent of the book sale in Kerala is through DC Books and Current Books. Both are also the publishers and authorised dealers of many Indian and Foreign publications including reference books.
DC Offset Printers, the production unit of DC Books, maintains excellent quality in production. Several awards received by this unit from Federation of Indian Publishers and the State Government bears testimony to this.
Thus today, DC Books brings out one book per day on an average and has published 3300 titles so far. DC Books has paved the way for a total revolution in Kerala’s Book Industry by inculcating and improving the reading habit among the public and by including indirectly to improve the design, printing and quality of books, and cultural progress in general.
