The 34-year-old annual Jamshedpur Book Fair ended for this year on Sunday with a clear verdict. Selfies posing with books are in, buying books not so much.
If you get books at half the price on e-commerce sites, book fairs will just be a place to hang out with friends and click selfies and pictures for Facebook and Instagram, say visitors. Which is why booksellers in unison told this paper that crowds did not equal sales.
This year, the book fair on Rabindra Bhavan grounds, Sakchi, had 72 stalls, mostly from Delhi and Calcutta. Footfall was around 35,000 in the 10 days from November 16. Sales dropped by 30 per cent from last year and by 50 per cent from pre-demonetisation 2016, booksellers claimed.
What sellers knew but did not want to admit was that book lovers browse through titles at the fair to buy them online after surfing for best deals. Thanks to economies of scale, booksellers can’t match discounts offered by giants Flipkart and Amazon.
Rajiv Sharma, senior sales executive, Kitaabghar Prakashan, New Delhi, said footfall was also down. “Fewer schoolchildren visited us. We recovered the cost of setting up our stall, that’s it.” Asked why, a seller from Calcutta, S. Pandit, said the fair strangely never recovered from the demonetisation blow. “DeMo is gone, we have card swiping machines, but sales are down.”
Bestsellers by Amish Tripathi, Chetan Bhagat, Sudeep Nagarkar, Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, light reads and popular titles such as Harry Potter and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank found some buyers. But serious books lay unsold.
Asked why, Nikunj Naredi, a fashion design faculty with Arka Jain University, said browsing through books at the fair was fun but deals were better online. “I liked a design book at the fair that cost Rs 1,795. When I Googled it, I found it was available for Rs 795 on a site. Anybody looking for a good collection will buy books online to save big money. Unfortunate but true.”
Principal of Motilal Nehru Public School Ashu Tiwary agreed online sites offered cheaper and more varied options when it came to buying books for the school library.
Calcutta’s Subarna Chakraborty, manager from Future Printers and Publishers, said they ran into losses. “There was a time when we waited for this Jamshedpur event. But this year is our worst yet. We may have to reconsider (whether to come to the book fair) if the trend continues.”
Ashish Choudhury, secretary of The Tagore Society, which owns the venue, agreed people got better deals on e-commerce websites. “But we cannot lose the battle so easily. I think if not 30 per cent, there has been a loss of 15 per cent (in sales) this time. May be we can plan things better next year.”
For many Jamshedpureans, visiting the book fair was an annual pilgrimage. Uma Rani, a book lover who visited the fair with her family, said, “Call it nostalgia or tradition, we love going to the book fair, meeting people over cups of tea. And yes, buying books.”
