Twist in tale on World Book Day: Rekindled interest for books but ...
While thrilled to see that book reading is picking up again, booksellers, however, still have a few good reasons to feel dejected. One of them is low footfall at their brick-and-mortar stores.
On World Book Day on Tuesday, some of the prominent bookstore owners in the state capital reflected on how the changing reading habit—shift from physical books to e-books—and mushrooming of online stores were impacting their businesses.
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“With this trend catching up, the local bookstores will have to shut shops. The possible loss of local bookstores will be a blow to the localities and communities they serve. We need to save the bookstores,” said Gaurav Prakash of Universal Booksellers. Prakash said much of the deflection of customers from the bookstore happened after the pandemic.
Online purchasing of books has led to an approximately 30% reduction in the footfall at Universal Bookstore, and 20 to 30 percent of the consumers have shifted to online platforms for books, said Prakash.
He said, “Selling a product at minimal value even below the cost price is not business, rather a destruction of clean competition in a passionate industry.”
Booksellers have seen waves of trends come and go among readers, with the first distraction from paperback books coming in the form of internet access.
“Email came around in 1994-95 and smartphones and social media followed close after,” Prakash recalled, saying that there was a lull in readers when quicker options appeared online, including the Kindle (a device to read online books), which ran its course in about two years in the early 2010.
“We too have had to evolve, with holding author events in the city, inviting writers to the store for interactive sessions, providing discounts and more,” he said.
Amit Kumar Singh of the National Book Trust said that online sales could be an added benefit to physical bookstores as they serve to increase the sales of titles. He viewed bookstore events as a means to increase sales.
Contrary to booksellers’ view, a mother and her two daughters are seen carrying a bag of children’s books for the younger child at a bookstore in Gomti Nagar. While the older daughter Nandini Chaurasia is not a reader, but she recognised the importance of books for her younger sister Aishvi.
“I know from experience that trying to read on a phone or tablet will not serve the purpose for her. Reading books will help her build a strong vocabulary, whereas on the phone there is possibility of her getting distracted,” she explained. She further justified, that while she never could develop an interest in reading, she hopes for her sister that she does.
Another mother of two Priyanka Tiwari said, “I wish children would read more. I grew up holding books and reading them and that old world charm is undeniable,” she said, as her kids wandered around looking for school supplies.
“Reading on screens will never give the same pleasure as reading a book. Going to a library and searching your book out will never compare to typing the name into a search bar,” she said.
Besides sales, the booksellers have also seen a shift in the reading choices of people from fiction to mythology.
“Earlier the most popularly preferred genre used to be fiction, which has now changed to books on spirituality, self-help mythology, as well as Hindi books. The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi, Ikigai by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia, and the Amar Chitra Katha comics were the highest selling books at the fair this year,” said Akarsh Chandel, organiser of Lucknow Book Fair. He said few years back, the most sought after books were fiction and fantasy series like Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson, etc.
Amit Kumar Singh also reported the same, having conducted the Gomti Riverfront Book Fair in Lucknow for two consecutive years now.
Prakash too said that he added shelves for Hindi titles in his store and have plans to expand that further - “About 25 to 30 percent of our titles are Hindi books at the moment.”
Meanwhile, Chandel said that more young people are developing a reading habit, “A majority of the visitors at our book fair for the past three years have been youngsters.”
With the ease of self-publishing books and young people looking at careers in novel writing, book fairs and popular bookstores tend to attract more young people these days, agree booksellers and publishers.
“Youngsters want to see their own books on the stalls as well and take interest in books written by people their age,” said Singh.
“Earlier, very few people could think of being an author as a full-time profession, but now more and more youngsters are opting for this.”
Chandel too, who set aside stalls for first-time authors at the Lucknow Book Fair reported the same. Many youngsters have been visiting our annual book fairs lately, knowing that they will get a platform.
