Hunting for Crazy Discounts?

Bookshops today are luring more customers with the power of discounts. You might think a 90 per cent discount is ridiculous but it does exist.

If you live in the UK and earn the national per capita income (roughly £ 20,000), the cheapest edition of Orhan Pamuk's recent Istanbul: Memories of a City will cost you one-tenth of your daily pay (£5.39).

If you live in Delhi and earn what the average Delhiite earned last year (Rs 53,976 according to the government), you will have to work two full days to pay for the cheapest edition of Istanbul (around Rs 300).

Books are expensive here, but book shoppers earn many times the average. "We are cheap in India," says Om Book Shop chain co-owner Ajay Mago, "here Rs 200 is nothing, in the UK even £1 is a huge value."

Figures from 2003 suggest sales of Rs 7,000 crore for the entire Indian publishing industry. Of this, less than half is in English, and less than a third of that is general publishing "" the books one sees in a bookshop.

The industry is growing fast, as it reaches out to perhaps 20 million English speakers and readers in India, but print runs are still tiny "" 20,000 for a fiction bestseller, under 5,000 for serious non-fiction.

Most people still have very few general-interest books or novels at home. Reading is not yet a habit "" bus passengers, the queue-bound, and even people at coffee shops rarely have a book open in front of them to help pass the time.

And there is competition. Delhi's South Extension market alone has three well-known shops "" Om Books, Midland and Teksons "" and another few specialising in second-hand or bargain-basement sales.

Increasingly, every mall is equipping itself with a bookshop. "We generate the footfalls. We get the repeat crowd. People don't come to a garment store every week," says Om's Ajay Mago.

The books business functions on margins. The publisher offers a margin to the distributor, who does likewise with the retailer. If the retailer's margin is wide enough (it can go up to over 50 per cent), he can choose to offer discounts to his customers to boost volume.

Some bookshop chains in Delhi now offer across-the-board discounts on all titles, or discounts on specific kinds of books. Midland Book Shop offers a standard 20 per cent off on all books. Om Book Shop gives 10 per cent to 90 per cent off during their annual summer sale. Teksons offers discounts (25-33.3 per cent) on some children's and coffee-table books.

"We want the customer to think that at this price the book is worth it," says Mirza Assad Baig, Midland's owner. He gives the example of Ramachandra Guha's latest book, India After Gandhi. The cover price is Rs 695 but Baig is selling it at Rs 530, or almost 25 per cent off. "Distributors offer us margins from 12.5 per cent to 40 per cent," he says.

"If the margin is low and we want to give a bigger discount on a particular book, the distributor may give some cash in exchange." He adds, pointedly, "Some booksellers say they offer a huge discount, but they are taking the overseas price. If Penguin is offering a book with a cover price of £20 in the UK market at a special Indian price of £15, then a bookseller shouldn't sell it here at (the equivalent of) £15 and then claim to be offering a discount. The customer should know the truth."

"There are two categories of discount books," says Mago, "those in high demand, and those that aren't selling." Bargain sections in most bookshops carry the latter "" children's picture books, golf encyclopedias, textile patterns etcetera.

Do discounts attract buyers? Quite a few budget buyers may look up a book in one shop but purchase it where they get a discount. "Why should I pay more?" asks one, "If I buy three-four books at a time, I save more than the auto fare or petrol. It's worth it."

A mouthshut.com reviewer writes that Midland's discount "makes a lot of difference when the minimum price for even a paperback thriller is Rs 250-275".

Then there are "walk-in buyers" Mago says, "those who are looking for something specific and don't have time to browse (they go straight to the cash counter and ask for a particular book), and those who are looking for bargain books "" maybe something cheaper for their kid". He says that 80 per cent of his customers are of this type "" they know exactly what they want, "something like Dan Brown or Harry Potter".

At the same time, most bookshops have a number of loyal customers. One way that booksellers retain and reward such customers is through loyalty programmes similar to those pioneered by big Western booksellers like Barnes&Noble.

Oxford Bookstore and Om Books both offer loyalty cards to their customers. Customers accumulate points based on the value of their purchases and redeem them periodically for gift vouchers. An Oxford representative called this an "indirect discount".

Unlike readers, authors must now dread visiting bookshops. If Raj Kamal Jha were to enter Om Book Shop today, for example, he would see The Blue Bedspread in the discount pile near the door at more than 80 per cent off. But he should take heart, because lying right next to him is Arthur C Clarke.