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Title:
How India's smartphone revolution is creating a new generation of readers and writers
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Description:
India has the second largest population of any country in the world -- yet it has only 50 decent bookstores, says publisher Chiki Sarkar. So she asked herself: How do we get more people reading books? Find out how Sarkar is tapping into India's smartphone revolution to create a new generation of readers and writers in this fun talk about a fresh kind of storytelling.
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Speaker:
Chiki Sarkar
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Look all around you.
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Whether you're in a subway, a park,
an airport, a restaurant,
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even at this conference,
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all of you have a phone in your hands
or maybe in your pockets.
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How many of you have a book?
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Very few, right?
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This is the sight that used to greet me
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every time I walked out
of my office block.
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I was surrounded by a sea
of 20-something professionals
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glued to their phones.
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And not a single one
had a book in their hands.
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And this used to make me
very, very frustrated.
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I was a bookworm all my life.
¶
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Books formed the milestones of my life.
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The first man I fell
in love with was Mr. Darcy.
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I first read "Harry Potter" when I was 21,
on a summer break from college.
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And I remember the first night I spent
in a little flat I bought in my mid-20s,
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very proudly,
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and I spent the whole night
reading "The Da Vinci Code."
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And then I'm going to make
a terrible confession:
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even today, when I'm low,
I get into bed with "War and Peace."
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Don't laugh.
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But I was also like all those
people I saw around me:
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I, too, lived on my phone.
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I ordered my groceries online,
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and soon my app knew
that I needed a monthly dose of diapers.
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I booked my cinemas on my phone.
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I booked planes on my phone.
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And when I did the long commute back home
like most urban Indians,
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and was stuck in traffic,
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I passed the time on WhatsApp,
video-chatting my twin.
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I was part of an extraordinary revolution
that was happening in India.
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Indians are the second-largest
users of smartphones in the world.
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And data prices have been
slashed so radically
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that half of urban India
and even a part of rural India
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now have a smartphone
with a data connection in their hands.
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And if you know anything about India,
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you'll know that "half" means,
like, all of America or something.
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You know, it's large numbers.
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And these numbers are just growing
and growing and growing.
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They're exploding.
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And what they're doing
is empowering Indians
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in all kinds of extraordinary ways.
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And yet, none of these changes
that I was seeing around me
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were reflected in my world,
my world of books.
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I live in a country the size of Europe,
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and it only has 50 decent bookshops.
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And Indians just didn't seem
to want to read for fun.
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So if you look at all
the best-seller lists in India,
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what you'll always find
in the best-seller list
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is exam and professional guides.
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Imagine if you found the SAT guides
as the "New York Times" number one seller,
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month after month.
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And yet, the smartphone revolution
was creating readers and writers
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of a different kind.
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Whether it was on Facebook or WhatsApp,
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Indians were writing and sharing
and reading all kinds of things:
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terrible jokes, spurious pop history,
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long, emotional confessions,
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diatribes against the government.
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And as I read and shared these things,
I wondered to myself,
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"Could I get these writers
and these readers,
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could I turn them into my readers?"
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And so I left my plush corner office
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and my job as the publisher
of India's top publishing company,
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and I set up on my own.
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I moved into a single large room
in a cheap bohemian district of Delhi,
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with a small team.
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And there, I set up
a new kind of publishing house.
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A new kind of publishing house
needs a new kind of reader
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and a new kind of book.
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And so I asked myself,
"What would this new reader want?
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Would they prize urgency, relevance,
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timeliness, directness --
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the very qualities they seem to want
from their online services,
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indeed, the qualities they seem
to want from life today?"
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I knew that my readers
were always on the go.
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I'd have to fit into
their lifestyle and schedules.
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Would they actually want to read
a 200-page book?
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Or would they want something
a little bit more digestible?
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Indians are incredibly value-conscious,
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especially when it comes
to their online reading.
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I knew I had to give them
books under a dollar.
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And so my company was formed,
and it was born.
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It was a platform where we created a list
of stories designed for the smartphone,
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but it also allowed amateur writers
to upload their own stories,
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so they could be showcased
along with the very writers
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they read and admired.
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And we could also enter into
other people's digital platforms.
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imagine you're a receptionist,
you've had a long day at work,
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you book your cab
in your ride-hailing app,
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it shows up,
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and you get into your car,
and you lie back on your seat,
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and you put on your app.
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And you find a set of stories
waiting for you, timed to your journey.
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Imagine you're a gay young woman,
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in a relatively conservative city
like Lucknow, which lies near Delhi.
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There's no way your parents
know about your sexuality.
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They'd completely freak out.
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Would you like lesbian love stories
written in Hindi, priced under a dollar,
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to be read in the privacy of your phone?
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And could I match readers
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to the events that were taking place
around them in real time?
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So we published biographies
of very famous politicians
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after they won big elections.
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When the supreme court
decriminalized homosexuality,
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an LGBTQ collection was waiting
on our home page.
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And when India's Toni Morrison,
the great writer Mahasweta Devi died,
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our readers found a short story by her
as soon as news hit.
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The idea was to be relevant
to every moment of a reader's life.
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They're mostly young men
under the age of 30.
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There's someone like Salil,
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who lives in a city where
there isn't a modern bookshop.
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And he comes to our app almost every day.
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There's someone like Manoj,
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who mostly reads us
during the long commute back home.
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And there's someone like Ahmed,
who loves our nonfiction
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that he can read in a single sitting,
and that's priced very low.
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Imagine if you're like a young, techie boy
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in India's Silicon Valley
city of Bangalore.
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And one day, you get
an in-app notification
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and it says that your favorite actress
has written a sexy short story
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and it's waiting for you.
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That's how we launched Juggernaut.
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We got a very famous ex-adult star,
called Sunny Leone.
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She's India's most Googled
person, as it happens.
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And we got her to write us
a collection of sexy short stories
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that we published every night for a week.
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And it was a sensation.
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I mean, no one could believe
that we'd asked Sunny Leone to write.
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But she did,
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and she proved everyone wrong,
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and she found this immense readership.
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And just as we've redefined
what a book is and how a reader behaves,
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we're rethinking who an author is.
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In our amateur writing platform,
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we have writers that range
from teenagers to housewives.
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And they're writing all kinds of things.
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It starts as small as a poem,
an essay, a single short story ...
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Fifty percent of them are returning
to the app to write again.
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Take someone like Neeraj.
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He's a middle-aged executive,
wife, two kids, a good job.
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And Neeraj loves to read.
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But every time Neeraj read
a book that he loved,
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he was also filled with regret.
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He wondered to himself
if he could write, too.
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He was convinced
he had stories in his mind.
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But time and real life had happened,
and he couldn't really manage it.
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And then he heard about
the Juggernaut writer's platform.
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And what he loved about it
was that he felt this was a place
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where he could stand
head and shoulders, equally,
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with the very writers
that he most admired.
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And so he began to write.
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And he snatched
a minute here, an hour there,
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in between flights in airports,
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late at night, when he had
a little bit of time on his hands.
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And he wrote this
extraordinary story for us.
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He wrote a story
about a family of assassins
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who lived in the winding
lanes of Old Delhi.
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We loved it, it was so fresh and original.
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And before Neeraj knew it,
he'd not only scored a film deal
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but also a second contract
to write another story.
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Neeraj's story is one of the most read
stories on our app.
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My journey is very, very young.
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We're a two-year-old company,
and we have a long way to go.
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But we already, and we will
by the end of this year,
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have about half a million stories,
many priced at under a dollar.
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Most of our readers love reading
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and trying out authors
they've never, ever heard of before.
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Thirty percent of our home page reads
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comes out of the writing
that comes from our writer's platform.
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by being accessible and relevant,
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I hope to make reading a daily habit,
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as easy and effortless
as checking your email,
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as booking a ticket online
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or ordering your groceries.
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And as for me,
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I've discovered that as I entered
the six-inch world of the smartphone,
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my own world just got very, very big.
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