Under siege: Bookstores

When the author Ann Patchett started her bookstore some years ago, Time asked her what was needed if new stores like Parnassus were to survive. She said: "People are not mean spirited, but they really do go into bookstores with their iPhones, scan the barcodes of the books they want and order them on Amazon. We need to have someone say, 'This isn't good.' If you like the warm feeling you get in a bookstore, then you can't do that."

Four years later, Parnassus is still thriving because of careful curating and community goodwill. It's one of a small but hardy group of independent bookstores in the US that has weathered the twin threats posed by Amazon and online book chains, and the pressures of the retail sector.

In those four years, the brick-and-mortar bookstore business in India has been rocked by similar waves of change. Three beloved indies, AA Hussain and Co in Hyderabad and Manneys and Twistntales in Pune, shut down. (This column will focus on the general trade hardback/paperback segment rather than the textbook segment for now.)

The proprietors of AA Hussain and Manneys were near retirement, and didn't want to go the extra mile to keep their stores open in a time of online-retail driven turbulence and sluggish brick-and-mortar sales. Twistntales found it impossible to cope with the many pressures on small bookstores. Bookstores must stock copies of books that customers might want, even if the demand for these books is neither steady nor reliable. Indies struggle with low turnover and high warehousing challenges.

A good bookseller builds customer loyalty in a way that online chains rarely match, by anticipating reading tastes. A few bookshops thrive because they've created a very special bond with readers: Strand and now Kitabkhana in Mumbai, Ram Advani in Lucknow, The Bookshop and Fact & Fiction in Delhi, and Seagull's indie outlet in Kolkata, for instance.

But brick-and-mortar bookstores cannot match the discounts that online bookstores like Flipkart and Amazon offer. For many online retailers, bookselling adds to their brand identity while not forming their core business, which is often driven by smartphones and electronic goods.

Deep discounts are standard: no online bookseller minds if their customers browse elsewhere, so long as they buy online. In price-sensitive India, book-buyers look for big discounts and good delivery. So far, Flipkart has led the online book retail business; unconfirmed estimates place their marketshare at 75 per cent. (This will be challenged as competitors try to grab a bigger slice of the online trade.)

For a country with growing literacy in at least two dominant languages, English and Hindi, India has a dismayingly low bookstore-to-reader ratio, and this has grown worse. All of the three big bookstore chains, Crossword, Landmark and Oxford, have shut at least one store in the last few years. Crossword shut down two outlets in Bengaluru in 2014 alone. By the time Landmark shut down its Nungambakkam outlet in Chennai, the store sold so many other products that books accounted for only 27 per cent of its sales.

In bookstores from Goa to Bengaluru to Delhi, I heard the same story: independents could not match online deep discounts. They were haemorrhaging custom, especially over bestsellers.

Hachette India's managing director, Thomas Abraham, is blunt. He places online retail's share of the trade at 50-60 per cent, compared to under 10 per cent some five years ago, but says they tend to chase bestsellers rather than offer range.

"Deep discounting on the online side has become a major problem," he wrote. "Most of online unleashes deep discounting in a bid to get 'eyeballs', traffic and transactions-at-any-cost, and thereby boost valuation. They can sustain their deep discounting to levels that your neighbourhood stores cannot. Indie and chain bookstores are forced to close down. Over the past five years the number of store closures are more than we've had in the preceding 20 years."

Discounts might make already cheap books even more accessible, but for readers, the closure of bookstores slashes choice and range.

(In future columns, Printer's Devil will look at the online-versus-offline struggle and other aspects of publishing in India in greater detail.)
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