Punjabi publishing in India runs on small houses with print runs in the hundreds, distributed through a handful of shops, book fairs and the writers themselves.
The main centres are Amritsar, Ludhiana, Patiala and Delhi. A poetry collection selling a thousand copies is a success. Very few Punjabi writers make a living from books.
Institutional buying, by Punjabi University, the language departments and the public libraries, is what keeps most of the sector alive, and it fluctuates with state budgets.
In Pakistani Punjab, Punjabi publishing in Shahmukhi is smaller still, run by a determined minority against a system in which Urdu occupies the entire official and educational space.
The Punjabi Sahit Akademi at Ludhiana, the Punjabi Academy at Delhi and the Sahitya Akademi's Punjabi programme are the institutional supports, and they are modest.
A literature with a thousand-year continuous tradition survives on print runs of five hundred.
The economics are simple. A print run of five hundred at a low cover price cannot pay an author, so almost every Punjabi writer has another job and most have been teachers.
Institutional buying keeps the houses alive and it also shapes what is published, because a book libraries will buy is safer than one readers might.
Digital publishing has not solved it. Punjabi ebook sales are negligible, and the Gurmukhi typesetting and font situation was poor for a long time and is only now workable.