The gift that keeps giving

In February and March this year while this column was away there was a sudden efflorescence of articles and blogs in the Western English-speaking world about how to save the bookshop. Why, I dont know. There doesnt seem to have been any new threat to this embattled institution. Perhaps it was one more instance of hand-wringing in traditional publishing. Perhaps it grew from the books news: more trouble for the big US retailers, standoffs over pricing between big retailers and publishers, the growth of online self-publishing, a levelling off of the growth in ebooks, local bookshop closings actually, that last is no longer news.

What is news, it appears, is the desperate search for new ideas in books retailing, particularly at the independent end of the market. This time around, the focus was on borrowing ideas from e-retail and the social media: i.e., convenience and participation, with a side order of monetisation. A sampling: design your shop as an experience (coffee bars and intimate spaces), follow (that is, keep talking to) your clientele online, develop more niche/quirky bookshops, hold more people-pulling events, test the waters on crowdfunding, look at paid membership models, ask customers to pay to browse (ha, ha!). Also, seek government support and subsidies la France and Germany, and fight price discounting.

There is nothing very new here. And what else should one expect? The product at the centre of it all the book is, regardless of format, old. The big change in the books world in the last century has been the focus on the new bestseller. A corollary is the devaluation of the backlist, which really ought to be a publishers mainstay. From the fixation on volume and profit flows the star author, frantic marketing, the relative poverty of big-chain store shelves (I always find more books to buy at a small bookshop), and the impossibility of single shops effectively competing with big retailers, online or otherwise. At the same time its hardly certain that all readers of bestsellers are also potential customers for less mass-market books.

And here I want to change tack. I want to point out how short-sighted we are being. The really basic issue, the one at the root of the root, in India as anywhere, is not small vs big, whether the publisher is necessary, or whether indeed every published author deserves an equal chance to be read. The basic issue, the moral core, the key to the future of books as a diverse and healthy ecosystem is creating better readers. It isnt even that hard to do.

We hear much about robber barons and billionaire philanthropy these days. And whenever we do, somebody mentions Andrew Carnegie, the American industrialist who was born poor but built a steel empire and a towering fortune and gave nearly all of it away to useful causes before he died in 1919. The most famous of those causes was libraries some 3,000 across the USA. They are often lovely grand old buildings that fully deserve their cargo of literature.

In The Best Fields for Philanthropy, an 1889 essay in the North American Review (hard on the heels of his more famous Wealth), Carnegie told his fellow millionaires: What is the best gift which can be given to a community? [A] free library, provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution.

The proviso is important, no less in India today (just look at our public schools). And true, India is mainly rural. But so what? A nationwide network of public libraries is a gift we should have given ourselves decades ago. But we didnt: so, philanthropists, please help. Free libraries would be good for Indian authors, publishers, even bookshops because, with their range of books, they help create readers, and at a much younger age than books like Chetan Bhagats allegedly do.

Otherwise, the base of book buyers in India will stay as small, as limited and as unimaginative as every retailer knows it actually is. Such a market even as it grows in absolute terms will offer no safe space for small bookshops, ever.

rrishi.raote@bsmail.in