NEW DELHI: Indian police have seized more than 20,000 pirated books, including titles by novelists Arundhati Roy and Haruki Murakami, to dismantle a major piracy ring, publishers said Monday.
The raids, which took place on March 15, highlight the scale of piracy in India’s book market -- and the country’s enduring love of reading. It exposed a “sophisticated and large-scale distribution operation”, Penguin Random House India said in a statement, who said it worked with police in collaboration with fellow publishers Hay House, and Simon & Schuster India.
“The nearly 24-hour operation targeted multiple warehouses as well as an illegal printing press,” Penguin Random House said. It said it had dealt “a substantial blow to an entrenched piracy network”, and marked “one of the largest recent seizures of pirated books” in the capital.
Books seized included works by historian Yuval Noah Harari, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, leadership expert Simon Sinek, and James Clear, who writes about personal improvement.
