After easing lockdown norms, new readers have started coming to the bookstores in Bangalore, which has led to an increase in sales.
Bengaluru: At a time when all sectors and businesses are still struggling to stay afloat despite the easing of lockdown norms, bookstores are receiving good responses from their customers.
Their weekday sales are now nearing the sales they had pre Covid. Owner of Blossom Book store, Mayi Gowda said, “On weekdays we see 150-200 customers and on Saturday and Sunday we have 600-700 customers.”
Aruna Naidu who owns her own publishing company, named Authors Channel, said, “Readers in this pandemic didn’t find any difficulties while buying books whether online or offline.” Though the bookstore was shut for months because of the lockdown, buying books never stopped. Krishna Gowda, owner of Bookworm said, “They (customers) used to send their orders in my WhatsApp, and they were collecting the books through Dunzo and Swiggy.”
Footfalls are increasing in bookstores post lockdown, as many new readers are now coming to the bookstores. He said that these new readers are young adults, adding, “When lockdown was there people started the habit of reading again, at this moment this is resulting in an increase in sale. Nowadays social media plays the key role in attracting this new crowd of readers.”
Many young people got time in the lockdown, to go back to the old habit of reading books. Many young minds are now developing reading habits which were long lost. Dhruv, a 13-year-old boy who discovered his love for reading during the pandemic said, “Now after lockdown, I come to bookstore more frequently, maybe once in a week, and buy a lot of books together.”
Aruna Naidu who is also a distributor said, “Readers have increased, even authors also increased. Authors are more in India now, before 10 years also there were not so many authors. But now if you see there are n-numbers of authors. Every day 100 new authors are publishing their books.” With the coming of new authors in the market, readers have a varied range of books and genres. This has also helped bookstores to regain their sales post lockdown.
The publishing industry usually sees a hike in their sales from mid-November to mid-January. As this is a festive season, usually all retail sales go up during this time. This year both publishers and bookstores are hoping to make a profit of Rs. 30-40 lakh in this period. With new readers and authors coming in, bookstores are recovering from their last year’s losses well.
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