You might love reading, and the stack of books on your shelf could be growing at an almost alarming rate. It’s possible that there isn’t a new release you haven’t got your hands on, but it’s also possible that despite all this, it’s been a few short (or long) months since you saw the inside of a book store.
All those one-click buys and doorstep deliveries have made it easier for you to stay put while your book travels to you; convenient of course. Perhaps a little too convenient, though and occasionally, a bit boring too.
Thankfully, every year, February arrives with a pretty neat solution. As summer begins to dip its toes into Delhi’s chilly air, billboards appear with promises of nine days of packed bookshelves and nothing but complete indulgence for every book lover in the city. Part of the city’s calendar for 41 years, the New Delhi World Book Fair (NDWBF), organised by the National Book Trust (NBT), is now a major event, demanding both the attention and attendance of anyone looking to spend a little time with books.
While around it, the whispers which talked of threats to brick and mortar bookshops and physical books have grown to frenzied, worried discussions, the fair has survived, and survived well. One would assume that the numbers at the fair would dwindle, with people opting for better, cheaper offers and new generation Kindles and Nooks. Fortunately, and surprisingly, this has been far from the truth.
Kapil Kapoor, Sales and Marketing Director at Roli Books India, says that the kind of turnout NDWBF sees takes publishers by surprise too. “Anyone who comes to the book fair knows that it sees massive footfall. The numbers are unprecedented, really. Sometimes as publishers we are shocked, since the general vibe you get is that readership is going down. But when you go to the book fair, there are throngs of people, and sometimes it even gets difficult to manage the crowd,” says Kapoor, adding that these numbers have shown no signs of slowing down.
This fact is underlined by Caroline Newbury, VP Marketing and Corporate Communications at Penguin Random House, who says that while the footfall obviously varies by book fair and location, generally speaking the World Book Fair in Delhi always shows a strong footfall and good consumer interest. “Last year there were times when our stand was full to capacity with customers and even on weekdays and early in the day there is a steady stream of buyers.”
M. A Sikandar, Director, NBT India, has a lot to do with this growth trajectory. “I came from a different city. I had grown up and worked outside Delhi, and then when I got here, one of the first culture shocks for me was that the city had no real book culture. There were no libraries or book stores where people would just sit around.”
Sikandar says that he began with approaching different organisations and ministries, as well as NGOs. “I talked to officials at the CBSE, Kendriya Vidyala and some ministries. After all, my job was not just to put up stalls and stands for publishers. My primary duty was to get people to read.” Sikandar also noticed that the fair dates conflicted with the start of preparatory months in schools and colleges. “It takes years to shift dates, since the plan has to be made in advance. I started the process of changing the dates in 2011. Hopefully, in 2016, the dates will be moved to January. It’ll be colder, but hopefully people will still come.”
Newbury, though, doesn’t think that the dates have posed too big a problem. “There is no doubt that a large number of visitors are students but the fair draws readers of all ages. Running for 9 days, I think it gives a long enough period for as many people as possible to attend.”
The marked improvement in fair attendance has also prompted a rise in participation among not just distributors and booksellers, but also publishers themselves. Last year, 906 stalls out of a total of 2051 were set up by general and trade publishers. Kapoor feels that most publishers turn to the book fair as a strong brand building exercise.
“For publishers, there are two important reasons for putting up their stall at the fair. We do not say let’s maximise our sales and do maximum revenue at the fair. The retail aspect is not really a publisher’s job. The sale that happens is added benefit, but more important for us is that it is a very good brand building exercise. At your stall, you can display all the books you’ve published, including the older ones, and showcase them in one space. In no bookstore will you find a shelf just for Roli. At the fair, you can say, this is our brand, this is the work that we do.”
Shobit Arya, founder and publisher of Wisdom Tree, agrees, adding that in today’s scenario, there is barely a bookstore where a publisher can display even 20 per cent of their complete publishing list. “A book fair gives you a fantastic platform to expose the whole catalogue. Also, at a bookstore, your criteria of buying a book are primarily the author and the subject. The publisher is a subset. At a book fair, publisher is your first filter. This definitely provides a unique branding opportunity.”
This opportunity, to expose your brand to potential readers becomes even more important for the smaller and independent publishers, for whom fewer distributors and greater invisibility constantly pose a challenge. Even with financial constraints, many independent publishers try to book both standalone and shared stalls. This year, some of them include Duckbill, Karadi Tales and Zubaan Books. In Duckbill’s first year at the fair with their own stall, shared with Karadi Tales, Sayoni Basu says that for Duckbill, it is definitely a brand build exercise.
“And because it is very interesting to see how readers respond to one’s books. Whether they walk into the stall at all or walk by looking uninterested! And also because we hope it will be fun.”
Of course, a stall at the fair is a big dent for a small publishing house, and some, like Yoda Press, have opted to have their books displayed by their distributors instead.
Nishtha Vadehra, editor at Yoda, says, “Two years back we did have a stall but we just about made back the money from the sales. That time it was also a Yodakin (bookstore) and Yoda Press stall. But as a small niche publisher it’s also difficult to shell out the kind of cash a full stall requires.” This year Yoda Press titles, like “This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition” and two new poetry titles, “The Fingers Remember” by Aditi Rao, and “Rococo and Other Worlds: The poems of Afzal Ahmed Syed translated from the Urdu by Musharraf A. Farooqi”, will be displayed with their distributors Cambridge University Press and May Day bookstore.
The book fair, with titles you’ve missed in bookstores and publishers you didn’t know about, is a browser’s goldmine. Is it so much a buyer’s, though? While sales might not be of primary importance for publishers, they are undeniably one of the reasons to set up a stall in the first place. And with all those almost sinfully low discounts online, how do the sales figures compare? For Penguin Random House, things seem to be moving along satisfyingly. “I can’t share precise sales figures but we see a considerable amount of business during the fair. Having a dedicated stand allows us to showcase not only our bestsellers but also the wide range of backlist we publish, which may not normally be available in high street retail due to space constrictions. This allows readers to be able to discover and buy books they may not have noticed before,” says Newbury. Kapoor maintains that while not of foremost importance, sales are also not ignored by Roli Books. “The weightage would be 70 per cent brand building and 30 per cent sale. We try and give offers, some promotion, something to attract customers.”
Over the years, this need to attract customers has grown; a direct result of the impossible attraction of cheap and readily available options online. The once attractive 15 to 20 per cent discounts are satisfying fewer people, and you see a marked rise in offers, combo packs and other measures to grab eyeballs. Kapoor says that the trend of cheaper online sales has been a very destructive force for publishers.
“We have started giving more discount, though not unreasonable ones. And for many people the satisfaction of coming to a book fair is buying a book right then and there.”
Arya adds that even if publishers wanted, they couldn’t combat e-commerce players by matching them in discounts. “A book fair acts as a perfect foil to the mechanical experience of buying through e-commerce.” He believes that books in India are reasonably priced. “I don’t think one would go all the way to Pragati Maidan to look up books and then buy them online to save money that you actually would have already lost by having a samosa and chai there. “Offering extra discounts towards the end is just greed and desperation getting the better of you. Nothing else. The devil unfortunately can be matched only by another devil, which is remaindered books. Or by getting together to ensure that only healthy competition prevails.”
The remaindered books, combo packs and increasing discounts might be measures to combat an increasingly shifting and competitive market, but for readers, they are yet another reason to head to Pragati Maidan on February 14, to celebrate a very different, but very important kind of love
