The recent launch of the fifth book in the Harry Potter series showed that reading is alive and well in India.
Not that it needed reminding, for book store chains are exploding across metros in the country. And the trend is not just to sell books but to cultivate an outlook that shopping for books is an experience.
Book stores have added cha bars, read-with-the-author sessions, book launches, freebies and 'listening stations,' zones where you can hear book extracts.
If Chennai-based Landmark, which owns India's largest book store at 40,000 sq ft, in the shopping mall Spencer Plaza, has taken its store to Kolkata and Coimbatore, Kolkata-based Oxford Book Store opened two stores of 7,000 sq ft and 4,500 sq ft, in Mumbai and Bangalore respectively in the last six months.
Promoted by the Apeejay Surendra Group, Oxford will also have a presence in Delhi by the end of the financial year and expects to 'cover rest of the metros soon.'
Another Chennai-based book store, Odyssey, has reportedly earmarked Rs 16.5 crore (Rs 165 million) to open 30 stores in the next two-and-a-half-years.
Crossword Book Store Ltd, one of the first companies to introduce the concept of a book cafe, is also on an expansion spree.
Apart from its seven existing stores, it opened two stores in Pune last month and has plans chalked out to open four stores in three months. It will enter the Kolkata market by September this year.
Says Deepak Mirchandani of the publishing and distribution company, India Book House (IBH), which diversified into book retail with Crossword in 1991: "The book market is expanding and sales are going up. There is definitely a lacunae in the market which the book retailers are tapping."
IBH has since sold Crossword to Shoppers' Stop, a sister company of the Raheja group, "because it got a good price," says Mirchandani.
Hemu Ramaiah's Landmark recorded a turnover of Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million), while Crossword Book Store Ltd, jointly promoted by ICICI (49 per cent) and Shoppers' Stop (51 per cent), leaped to Rs 30 crore (Rs 300 million) on a sales growth of 40 per cent over the previous year.
A G S Bindra's First&Second, an online company with three offline stores in Delhi's NCR region, clocked Rs 12 crore (Rs 120 million) last year.
Says Bindra, whose company is promoted by UK-based Duncan & Macneils and has over a million titles online, "We will continue to focus on our online sales."
But company sources say First&Second will hit smaller towns like Varanasi, Kanpur and Lucknow.
Does this mean the death of small book stores is imminent? Not really. Naresh Sharma, Crossword's GM, marketing operation, says, "There is a tremendous potential in the market. Besides, customer loyalty in the retail book segment is high and smaller outfits enjoy that."
In fact, even the smaller and mid-sized companies don't want to be left behind.
Delhi-based Teksons which did a turnover of Rs 8 crore last year and has three stores in the city has recently opened its fourth in Saket "to cater to the Mehrauli, Gurgaon crowd."
Bangalore-based Shankar's The Book People, which has 12 outlets in the city and two airport shops in Kerala, similarly has plans to expand.
Shankar's N Sankaran, who's been in the book business for three decades is, however, sceptical of the current boom.
"You can't take books as any other commodity. If every store has the same kind of books, what's the fun? In this business you have to know how to select books and build customer relationship."
But Shankar's hasn't been able to avoid market pressure either and is considering a proposal to open a store in Victoria, the mall scheduled to be launched in Bangalore this October.
But as margins in the book business are getting thinner, companies are scrambling for innovations.
Sums up Sanjiv Mehra, CEO of Oxford Book Store Ltd, "We'll wait to see what book retailing is going to look like in India with nationalised retailing. It will bring about a standardisation in a business where buying habits are different. The only way to go into retail is to give value addition in terms of display and cafes to make retailing an experience."
