BENGALURU: This Independence Day, a group of entrepreneurs have decided to come together to celebrate the linguistic heritage of Kannada by launching a website called BookBrahma. The website will contain a repository of information about Kannada books, a profile of authors, and links to online and offline stores where readers can buy them.
Vinay Kumar J, Girish N Kerodi and Sathish Chappireke – co-founders of Verbinden Communications – ideated the website in 2018. “We had a shared love for Kannada literature and identified a gap,” said Sathish Chaprike, managing director of the company. More than 6,000 books are published each year, but many slip under the radar because the spaces for readers to discover these books have disappeared. “Kannada is one of the oldest known languages in India, yet today, its contemporary literature is surprisingly under-appreciated,” said Sathish.
BookBrahma aims to create a global platform that will unite readers, writers, publishers and reviewers, and aspires to contain a database of all Kannada books that have been published. For this, the founders have pooled about `70 lakh.
An editorial team of five has been working on it for a year and a half. Devu Pattar, head, BookBrahma, who was the only person reviewing the books in the beginning, says the website will curate good-reads and books that would be trending at the time. Through the platform, he hopes that an online community will be formed, which won’t be limited by geographical boundaries. “We do not want to promote the literature of a language by creating cultural islands. Kannada speakers are spread across the world today and if they wish, they must have some platform to access these books,” he said.
The website is the first step in trying to save a language through technological intervention. “Further along in this project, we want to start a digital publication house so that even Kannada literature can find a place on platforms like Kindle,” said Kumar.