Leaving the newspaper office hasn’t safeguarded my bookshelf space. It used to be the case that a dozen books or more were added to the home collection every month — most of them complimentary copies of new titles sent by publishers “for favour of review” and rejected by the books editor. Accommodating 200 new books a year at home is not easy, not with new bookshelves running at Rs 1,000 per horizontal foot and family members worrying about the dust.
With my hands off the slush pile, the problem should have been solved. Only it wasn’t. Our newest bookshelves, empty less than a year ago, are filling up fast.
This is because since 2012 there has been a second revolution in bookselling in India. (After Flipkart, that is.) A small gang of e-commerce companies is to blame. These sites do not specialise in books; indeed they sell everything from diapers to refrigerators in exactly the same way: with a spartan product page and a shockingly discounted price. There is no real effort to lure the book buyer, or any sort of buyer really, with opportunities to interact or form a community, essentially to commit — which is one of the very effective techniques used by Amazon.com and its copycats.
So, if you have already decided what book you want, you can find it and buy it very cheaply. If you’re looking to browse, on the other hand, you will go to sites that offer recommendations or a lively discussion environment or, much nicer, to a bookshop — and then you will come home and, click-click, you will buy on one of these piratical new sites the cheapest copy of the book that you have selected. It is utter commoditisation — now even in books.
It’s horrible, I suppose, for bookshops and publishers and authors (and even for poor Flipkart), but very convenient for me. It’s most delightful, for example, to find at last a pristine Rs 350 copy of a book that I’ve been looking for for years, when the only edition available on the “old” websites is priced at Rs 1,900.
As you may have guessed from the prices, my taste often runs to imported and out-of-print titles. The price benefit is not nearly as vast for contemporary titles by Indian publishers.
Even flinty negotiators like Flipkart and Amazon, who are said to demand high discounts from publishers, will find it hard to keep up. However, publishers — of all sizes — should take heart from a piece by writer George Packer in the New Yorker magazine published last month.
Packer’s article is a fairly detailed survey of Amazon’s growth and business practices pertaining to books and publishing. He asks whether Amazon, which he says is good for customers, is also good for books. He quotes an American publisher on Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s head: “The only point at which Bezos enters [the book publication] chain is to take all the money and the e-mail address of the buyer. There’s an entire community of people [authors, agents, editors, designers, marketers, reviewers, readers], and Bezos stands in the middle of it and collects the money.”
But he reveals one solution that some US publishers are looking into. Yes, Amazon has a formidable not to say dominant market position. But the Internet and social media, not to mention technology like print-on-demand and e-readers, give traditional publishers who feel squeezed by the e-commerce companies like Amazon a viable alternative: they can sell books directly to their customers, thus cutting out the distributor and retailer entirely. After all, why not?
It seems to me that publishers have few alternatives but to do this, even if they have to gang up to attain scale. Changes in banking and logistics mean that payment and delivery won’t be significant hurdles. And, fingers crossed, with a fresh ability to compete with the cost-cutters there may even be a small golden age coming up for small publishers — without too much of a price hit for readers.
Time to plan more bookshelves.
rraote@yahoo.com
