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Book stores take online hit
An impending doom looms large over the city’s brick and mortar bookstores. In the digital era, a book (paperback, e-book) is only a click away. The idea of buying books online caught fancy of the book lovers and placing an order online saves travel time to visit bookstores. Moreover, the local bookstores are unable to offer huge discounts unlike the online giants, leading to their abandon.
Vijayawada: An impending doom looms large over the city’s brick and mortar bookstores. In the digital era, a book (paperback, e-book) is only a click away. The idea of buying books online caught fancy of the book lovers and placing an order online saves travel time to visit bookstores. Moreover, the local bookstores are unable to offer huge discounts unlike the online giants, leading to their abandon.
- Buying books online caught the fancy of the people
- Onslaught of e-books that are available at less price than paperbacks, wrecked the bookstores
Bookstores in the city are finding it tough to tackle competition from digital book stores like Flipkart and Amazon. More than the paperbacks, it is the onslaught of e-books that have wrecked the local book stores. Typically, e-books are offered at a lower price as compared to a paperback. For instance, Amazon priced the Kindle version (e-book) of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The god of small things’ at Rs 175, while the paperback is priced at Rs 290.
V Aparna, a bibliomaniac, said that she is slowly switching to e-books due to the lower cost. She also cites portability as the main reason for the switch. “e-books are relatively cheap and also, it is easy to carry them around wherever I go. My Kindle can store almost 3000 books,’ she adds.
However, the bookstores in the city are putting up a brave front in spite of the digital threat. D Ashok Kumar, who runs Ashok Book Centre, admitted that book-selling business is not an extremely profitable venture. The book centre, which spans in 4,000 sq ft across two floors, boasts of 15,000 titles that are on display.
One of the oldest surviving bookstores has tied up with Amazon last year and Amazon displays the books available in the store, on its electronic bookshelves. “The reach of our books has increased after we registered with Amazon. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, we happened to have delivered our books everywhere,” Ashok added.
It is also reported that there have been no new entrants in the city’s bookselling business. P Harinatha Reddy, Manager of Visalandhra Book House said, “We observe mushrooming of mobile shops, textile stores and jewellery shops but that is not the case in book-selling business. Only those, who were traditionally in the business, are continuing.”
Book sellers also attribute low profitability to fewer sales of English books. They usually get a higher margin on the sales of English books as compared to Telugu books, but there happen to be few takers. However, in spite of intense cyber competition, local booksellers expressed hope that physical bookstores, are here to stay.
