An IT healthcare solutions expert, he worked out the technological kinks. Riton, though, wasn't about to take no for an answer. There's no demand, so Bangla books are not available. Bangla books are not available, so there's no demand. In a word, the futile circular logic of a classic Catch-22 situation. The response was coldly businesslike-it is not clear there is significant interest in Bangla books to merit support, the Amazon folks said. He harangued the folks at Amazon Kindle support. In India, Amazon Kindle supports Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam but not Bangla. Two years ago, he discovered that Amazon Kindle did not even support Bangla. 'The Amazon Kindle e-book ecosystem is so big, it just bothers me that Bangla does not have a footprint here,' he told me. These books are available freely, but Riton is keen to take it a step further. Its members run across the length and breadth of the world, and its administrators are in Dhaka, Kolkata and Mumbai, and it boasts of-I kid you not-over 40,000 online Bangla books. Started in 2012 by passionate book-lover Riton Khan, a 40-something Atlanta-based Bangladeshi expat, the Facebook group is hard to pin down geographically. This is where the 150,000-member Bangla bibliophile Facebook group Boier Hut comes in. The fact of the matter is it's crucially important to bring Bangla publishing up to speed in the digital age. Where's the fun of a digital book where the physical joy of a book nestling in our hands is replaced by ephemeral bits and bytes? The thought of Bangla literature invariably sends us into a nostalgic reverie, basking in fond memories of the annual book fairs at the Bangla Academy (or its gargantuan cousin in Kolkata).

We Bangla aficionados are rather a quaint, old-school lot.

Bengali books for sale