India's Book Piracy Bust Highlights Price Gap Dilemma and Affordability

Delhi police have seized more than 20,000 pirated books in a large-scale anti-piracy raid in Rohini, uncovering a major piracy ring, according to Penguin Random House India.

A statement released by the publishing company on Monday said that the nearly 24-hour operation which took place last week targeted “multiple warehouses as well as an illegal printing press” that resulted in the sealing of the printing press.

Among the seized titles were works by globally acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Daniel Kahneman, Arundhati Roy, Simon Sinek, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, and others.

An earlier raid conducted in November 2025 across three sites in Delhi had revealed details of two major distributors of pirated books to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and beyond, who were named in the FIR, according to HarperCollins India.

The raids highlight the scale of piracy in India's book market - and the country's enduring love of reading.

“Pirated books cost half the price as opposed to the original copy,” said Affan Ahmed, who runs MR Book Centre in Hyderabad, who asserted that he does not encourage such practices. “But for many sellers, business will be affected if they completely abstain from selling pirated books.”

Generational shift has seen an evolution in formats too. “The younger generation prefers to read on their mobiles, which means that they are not worried whether it's a pirated copy or not. They only look at the content,” he added. While non-fiction books are sold most, youngsters are increasingly reading graphic novels such as Japanese Manga.

“The original cost of the books are really exorbitant, and we cannot afford it. So I usually rely on either purchasing second hand books or counterfeit ones due to financial constraints. But when I think about collecting a book, I sometimes purchase the original version too,” said a student who did not want to be named.

Meanwhile, Siddhartha Malempati, a copy far left activist from Hyderabad, opined that while Penguin Random House calls this justice, they would call it akin to the landlord evicting the squatter and patting himself on the back. "Knowledge was never theirs to sell," he says, adding that “Twenty thousand books seized, not from the hands of profiteers, but from the hands of readers priced out of a system that treats knowledge as private property."

This Article is Written By Yoga Adithya and Naga Adithya, interns at Deccan Chronicle.