Linguistic Diversity in Decline? A Data-intensive Study of Indian Book Production Trends (2016-2025) via ISBN Metadata

This study examines the evolution of Indian book publishing between 2016 and 2025 using over 2.5 million ISBN registration records obtained from the National ISBN Agency of India. By employing data-cleaning techniques in OpenRefine and analytical workflows in Python, the research investigates year-wise publication growth, language-wise distribution, linguistic diversity, digital publishing trends, and reader engagement patterns. The findings reveal substantial growth in India's publishing output, interrupted only temporarily by the COVID-19 pandemic. Post-pandemic recovery was remarkably strong, with publication volumes surpassing pre-pandemic levels and continuing to grow rapidly. English emerged as the dominant publishing language, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all ISBN registrations, followed by Hindi, while regional languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, and Malayalam demonstrated steady but comparatively smaller growth. Using the Shannon Diversity Index, the study shows that linguistic diversity increased until 2022 but subsequently declined, indicating a growing concentration of publishing activity in a few dominant languages. The analysis also highlights the rapid expansion of e-book publishing since 2020, signalling a long-term digital transformation of the Indian publishing ecosystem. Goodreads rating data further reveal that while publication output has expanded significantly, reader engagement remains uneven, with a large proportion of titles receiving no ratings. The study demonstrates the value of ISBN metadata as a bibliometric resource for understanding national publishing trends and provides important insights for collection development, multilingual access, national bibliography planning, and policies aimed at preserving linguistic diversity in India's evolving knowledge ecosystem.