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Author: Krishna Tewari
Date: 25 June 2026
None of that content was new. All of it was Scholastic’s backlist, reformatted for screens and placed where a new generation of families actually watches.
It’s a useful question for every publisher to sit with: why did Scholastic do this, and why now?
Every publisher understands the economics of a new title: advance, production, print run, marketing, sales curve peaking in year one, tailing off by year three.
What gets discussed far less is the flat line after that. A title that sold well in 2018 sits in a warehouse or a digital catalogue — occasionally surfacing in a sale, a bundle, a rare institutional order. It is not being actively marketed. It is almost certainly not being consumed by a digital-native learner who has never heard of it.
The content itself has not aged. The knowledge inside a well-written STEM textbook, a children illustrated classic, or a professional reference work does not expire. But the format in which it exists has become invisible to readers who now consume primarily through screens, primarily through video, and primarily on demand.
This is not a content problem. It is a distribution and format problem. And for the first time in publishing history, it is entirely solvable.
A mid-sized Indian education publisher with fifteen years of operation typically holds 500 to 2,000 active titles. A larger trade or professional publisher holds considerably more. Some of India’s oldest houses hold catalogues that run to tens of thousands.
Every one of those titles represents a real investment — editorial, illustration, rights acquisition, fact-checking, curriculum alignment. That cost was incurred once. The amortisation period was treated as three to five years. But the content asset has an indefinite shelf life.
The question worth asking is straightforward: if you could convert that content into a format today’s audiences actually consume — and place it where they actually spend their time — what would the revenue look like?
Most publishers have never seriously modelled this. Until recently, the economics made it pointless.
Converting a textbook or an illustrated series into video was, until very recently, expensive and slow. Professional production for educational video ran between ₹3 lakh and ₹40 lakh per title depending on complexity. For a catalogue of 500 titles, the arithmetic was impossible.
Distribution was the second wall. Building your own streaming platform was a multi-crore infrastructure bet. Licensing to OTT platforms needed relationships, volume, and formats most publishers weren’t set up to deliver. YouTube was accessible in theory and punishing in practice.
So, the backlist stayed buried. And the industry collectively agreed, without quite saying so, that video was someone else’s business.
Two things shifted simultaneously, and both sides of the equation turned viable at once.
The production cost curve has collapsed.
Generative AI has brought the cost of converting a well-structured text title into broadcast-quality video down by roughly 90%. Not through a loss of quality — through a fundamental restructuring of the pipeline. AI handles scripting, visual generation, narration, and initial QC. Human editorial review, which remains non-negotiable for educational content, is applied at the output stage rather than at every step.
A title that cost ₹15 lakh to produce two years ago now comes in at ₹1–2 lakh. A catalogue of 200 titles — once a ₹30 crore project — becomes a manageable phased investment. Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher, reported in April 2024 that it was doubling its video content development versus the prior year, with a growing slate of on-demand AI video courses and live virtual training drawn directly from its existing author catalogue.
The distribution landscape has opened up.
Three real-world moves tell the story of what publishers are now doing with their backlists.
In each case, the underlying content was already owned. What changed was the publisher’s willingness to treat the backlist as a format-agnostic asset rather than a stock of printed books.
When a publisher converts backlist content into multilingual video and places it across the right channels, several streams become available simultaneously — most for the first time:
None of these streams requires a new author, a new idea, or new research. The content is already written. The IP is already owned.
Scholastic did not move first because Scholastic is a streaming pioneer. It moved because the window for category presence is finite.
Publishers who commit in the next twelve to eighteen months will build distribution relationships, FAST channel inventory, and platform partnerships before the category becomes crowded. Those who wait will negotiate from weaker positions — competing for the same shelf space, pressing down on the same licensing rates, claiming smaller slices of FAST inventory.
Your catalogue is unique. The editorial judgment built over fifteen or twenty years cannot be synthesised quickly by a competitor or a language model. But that advantage is only real if you act on it.
A content library that stays in a warehouse — physical or digital — is not a competitive asset. It’s an accounting entry.
The practical question is always: where do we begin? The catalogue is large, the technology unfamiliar, the distribution relationships non-existent.
The answer is consistent across every successful case I have seen start small, prove the unit economics, then scale.
A five-title Proof of Concept — across a mix of your strongest categories, tested in two or three languages, placed on two or three distribution channels — produces real data. Real view counts, real engagement metrics, real revenue signals. It replaces theory with a spreadsheet you can take to your board.
The infrastructure exists. The economics work. The distribution channels are ready.
The only decision left is whether to keep treating your backlist as an archive — or to treat it as what it actually is: an asset that has been underperforming for years, and that is ready, right now, to be put to work.
Krishna Tewari is Chief Growth Officer (Media Technology Division) at Logituit and writes on content, technology, and the business of knowledge. He advises organisations across media, publishing, and technology on growth strategy and digital transformation.
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