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Nayantara Srinivasan, "The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore in Contemporary India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Karishma Kaushal
Hi. This is your host, Karishma kaushal. I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter. With me today is Nayanthara Srinivasan, a PhD student at the University of Munster. Nayanthara and I both work on publishing and today we'll be discussing her monograph, which is the result of her Master's Dissertation on book selling and brick and mortar book selling in India. And I'm sure the book will be interesting to people who follow bookselling publishing in India and understand how the field has not been mapped at all and how Nayantara's work actually is very important in understanding India's, which is the world's third largest book market in the longer run. So. Hi, Nayantara. Hi.
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
I'm so happy to be here. Hi.
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Karishma Kaushal
So, okay, just to get started, could you talk a bit about your book and introduce the readers to the book? Sure.
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
So my mini graph, which is what Cambridge calls the series, is called the Brick and Mortar Bookstore in Contemporary India. And as Karishma just said, it sort of evolved from my master's thesis. So it's based on the research I did during my MA here at the University of Munster, which is also where I'm doing my PhD now. And what it is is sort of an exploration of a very contemporary moment, really, over the last five or six years, looking at what's been happening with brick and mortar bookstores in India and the sort of surprising resurgence or revitalization of physical bookstores in the country. And what I do in the book is kind of explore some of the reasons why I think that might be going on and why that's interesting, specifically in the context of India, where sort of the previous decade saw more bookstores closing, and why hopefully this new trend of bookstores opening is something that will stay.
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Karishma Kaushal
Okay. Thanks. Actually, yeah, that sounds lovely. So I think, I think, yeah, there's a lot of discussion in India about bookstores, and we have bookstores on social media and a lot of events, but I feel like we don't really understand the field as much. So it's, it's, it's fascinating to read your book. And I, I read your book and I think I understood so many things that I notice about bookstores in India, but don't really realize about the field, which is like, what's happening on ground and how they're kind of changing things about them to stay current and invite new audiences. But to start off, and I think this carries on from the last question, what, what led you to investigate bookselling in India?
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
So I guess the answer is that it's a combination of personal interest, some professional experience, and also timing, because I began my master shortly after, well, in late 2021, and I had spent the years before that actually working in publishing in Delhi. So I was in India and working in publishing during the months of a pandemic where there was Obviously, within the industry and outside of it. So much worry about the future of the bookstore, about the future of publishing after the pandemic and already in 2021. But also, as I moved out of India and started my ma, it was really fascinating to see these conversations evolve and extend outside of the industry. So it wasn't just people working in publishing who were talking about, oh, we need to protect bookstores. We need, you know, we need bookstores to stay alive. But this was also sort of spilling over into conversations I was seeing on social media or conversations I was hearing from friends. And it felt as well that more and more bookstores were becoming more visible and even that more and more bookstores were opening every day. And so when it came to the time that I had to think about, what do I want to focus on? For my master's thesis, it was really this question, what was going on with bookselling in India? Was this change something that I was just seeing because I was so enmeshed in these conversations? Was it really something new? Was it really something different that was happening? And so that's where I kind of began to look at things a bit more closely, to try and see whether this was just an impression I had or whether something was really going on with bookselling in India.
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Karishma Kaushal
That's fantastic. And, you know, actually a bookstore in India, I mean, we know it in so many different ways. So, I mean, most of us kind of grew up at bookstores and at railway stations. We grew up with, like, there's obviously a really. And we know that Penguin India recently led a crackdown on illegal book selling, but we know that there's a Book Patri Bazaar, which is like a roadside market for pirated books. And then there's. There's so many kinds, and then there's oftentimes you'd see a stationer who would also keep books. Right. That is, again, so common in India and especially children's literature. So in your research, could you describe what a typical bookstore looks like in and amongst the bookstores that you've looked at? Sure.
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
And I think that's such a good point to make. In the first place, what is a bookstore? What even. What do we count? Because in India, there are so many ways in which you can buy a book. In New Delhi, where I lived, you could buy a book if you're sitting at a traffic light and somebody is walking fast and trying to sell you a bestseller. You can buy a book if you're sitting on a train and somebody walks by selling the latest copies of Books, like you said, there's this whole kind of parallel book bazaar in so many cities. And researchers like Krita Mukherjee and Kanupriya Dhingra are doing really, really interesting work on that in Daryaganj and in College street in Kolkata. But my research actually focuses quite specifically on Anglophone trade brick and mortar bookstores. So physical bookstores selling books in English and not selling textbooks or reference books, but really selling trade books which are general interest fiction and nonfiction. And it's also important to mention that the main data set or the main sort of source for the bookstores I'm talking about comes from the series called Publishing and the Pandemic, which ran on the Indian news website Scroll Simply because if you've researched publishing or bookselling in India at all, you will realize we don't really have a list of all the bookstores in the country. We don't even know how many there are really. And so it was important for me to work with some kind of data set. And so my typical bookstore is also influenced by the fact that I'm working with the bookstores that are mentioned in these articles, which tend to be standalone bookstores across the country of varying sizes, and then also popular chains such as Crossword, which has multiple locations across the country. Many of the bookstores that I looked at in my research emphasize their own curation, whether that's along the lines of spotlighting Indian titles, spotlighting feminist titles, spotlighting independent presses. This comes up a lot in their own descriptions of what they do. But like you said, this is not necessarily a typical bookstore. And I think what a bookstore can look like depends so much on where you are in India and not necessarily even an urban, rural divide. There are lots of cities you would expect to have more bookstores than they do. I grew up in Chennai, and it really is. You can see the number of those bookstores kind of dramatically change over time. And I also did not at any point consider the whole network of airport and railway retail, which is very important in the country. But since I was also looking at 2020, 2021, so sort of the onset of and months following the Pandemic, I kind of excluded travel retail because that was obviously affected by travel restrictions and so on in such a different way. So those bookstores also don't. Don't really get a mention, but they're very important in the country.
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Karishma Kaushal
No, that's actually so fascinating what you see about travel retail, because this is one of the things that I was curious about, which is how do we look at travel Retail and these bookstores, which I consider to be quite, quite, quite mass market and quite different in their curation. But also I think you raised two very important points, which is firstly, I think for listeners, I think, for example, in, in the UK you have Nielsen Bookscan, which kind of maintains a record of the number of copies sold and it's easier to track a book and how it performs in the market after it is published. In India, we have no such database, which I think your, the opening sections of your book highlight so well, the absence of a database absence. I mean, the kind of mystifying nature of the publishing industry and of which book selling is such a big part and kind of like this, the kind of darkness that kind of bookstores operate and booksellers operate in, which is not knowing how a title will perform and kind of working on intuition and how that curation also comes from that intuition. And so I think, I think the scroll series, which is Publishing in the Pandemic, was so interesting and I think I came across that in your work and it was just fascinating to hear from everyone from the industry and how they approach the industry in the absence of hard data, which the government or third organization does not really maintain. And yeah, I think the second question, which is that book selling looks so different in India between rural and urban centers. And basically a typical bookstore that you're looking at is going to be based in these cities and how even cities have like a dwindling number of bookstores. So, yeah, so I think, I think this, the third question that I want to kind of talk to you about is the unspoken grammar of the international publishing industry, which you kind of refer to and comes from Thompson's metaphor in his work on the publishing industry. And also like in your research, what were, like, how do you think booksellers kind of decide what their curation should be based on? If you're talking about specialist booksellers and also this notion which you kind of refer to, which is this understanding of defining your curation, kind of defining your politics and actually making your politics accessible on social media, which is something booksellers have been doing right now. So what do you think think has kind of led to this change?
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
Well, that's a great question. It is also something I probably can't fully answer. I can probably speculate that quote about an unspoken grammar comes from John B. Thompson's Merchants of Culture, which is this really great sort of look at trade publishing in the UK and the US but it is also, I think, quite widely applicable, this idea that so much of the rules of publishing are kind of known to the people within publishing, but they're not recorded anywhere. They're not. It's an. It's completely unspoken. If you're in the system, you know how the system works. If you're not in the system, there's no real record of how these things work. And like you were saying in India, that's really compounded by this lack of data and this lack of organization. Nielsen Bookscan does exist in India, but for various reasons, they can't cover the entire market simply because a lot of their data for bookstores has to come from a bookstore actually having an online database. They have to be able to feed that data back to Nielsen Bookscan. And multiple bookstores in India don't yet have that technology. And Nielsen, I think, does release some numbers on the number of bookstores in the country. But these things are also so in flux and they change so quickly that it's really not. It's data that everybody has to work with in a sort of partial way. And so then to think about, if we don't have this data, how are bookstores making choices about curation? I think that's likely to be a combination of sort of their relationship with. With publishers and publishers sales representatives, really having somebody in a publishing company who can tell you, here are our new releases and here's what we think, you know, here's what we think you should order. But of course, also a knowledge of your own audience space, your own customer base. Booksellers have to know what it is that their specific customers are looking for and why, you know, the next best, the next new release, the next celebrity author might not necessarily be popular across markets. And so I think it's sort of combination of publisher expertise, bookseller expertise, both of which are especially bookseller expertise, I think just severely, severely underrated because especially in India, I think we're not used to really thinking about how much knowledge is behind when you walk into a bookstore holding a book and a bookseller says, hey, if you like this book, I think you might also like this one. And the level of sort of knowledge that comes with even a simple recommendation like that. Maybe we underestimate in this age of algorithms where, you know, Amazon just surfaces that for you, but a bookseller is working with a different set of logics.
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Karishma Kaushal
Yeah, no, that's actually fantastic. I have in Midlands, which is, I think, one of the bookstores you refer to briefly. I think I have always gotten excellent recommendations from Mirza Yaseen Beg, who used to is at Midlands. But it's a very interesting point that you raised, which is the relationship between booksellers and publishers. And I know that you don't look at publishers a lot because your book sells is so focused on the act of bookselling itself and a brick and mortar bookstore, but it's. What is the relationship between booksellers and publishers that you could gauge from all your research, which is, is it, is it like a. Like a symbiotic relationship? Is it sometimes adversarial? You know, because we know that things like book returns, for example, exist, which is the concept of unsold books being returned by a bookseller to a publisher. And then there's also, obviously you talk very importantly of the tension between publishers and booksellers and the fact that for the longest time, trade publishers in India were not actively supporting and encouraging people to support independent bookstores.
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
Yeah, it's something I think about a lot because, I mean, within publishing, all of these elements obviously need each other. Publishers need bookstores to sell their books, bookstores need publishers to publish them. And all of these different links in the chain are so vital. And of course, that relationship, the relationship between publishers and books sellers is a strong one that's existed in India over time. Right. Of course, publishers are constantly in communication with booksellers, I think where. I wouldn't say adversarial, but I think where things get complicated, which is what I talk about a little bit in, in the book, is with the advent of online retail, kind of making some of the, the logistical complications of bookselling in India very apparent. Because now with the entrance of somewhere like Amazon or Flipkart, publishers actually have somebody that they can work with who can give them data, who can give them regular sales, who can handle warehousing, who are actually organized, who, you know, where they are, and they're going to be there tomorrow and they're going to be there next month, and they're going to be there six months from now. And you sort of can't underestimate or understate in India how, how much of a difference that probably Makes because bookselling is so disorganized. So I think what happens is perhaps just a deprioritization maybe of the bookstore or this idea where it, it makes sense. I think from the outside that publishers will choose to prioritize places where they can get data or sales. And a small standalone bookstore might feel like they are being ignored or overlooked in that equation. And that is something that comes up a lot in these articles that I look, look at where booksellers do talk about how it can sometimes feel as if online retail is getting a lot more attention, a lot more sales, a lot more visibility to the detriment of, of the bookstore.
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Karishma Kaushal
No. Fantastic. And. And you know, actually your book and your research kind of led me to Susan Hawthorne's book on biblio diversity. And she talks about how bookstores such as Borders too, at some point had kind of like have destabilized. Had destabilized the market when they first came around and kind of put feminist bookstores out of business. And, and yeah, she. I mean, her concept of biblio diversity obviously is based on something like biodiversity and the richness of culture tied to like a better society at the end of the day. And so, and I think one of the most glorious things about your book, which is why I think it is if in academia you can say that a book has a happy ending, it has to be your book, because we do know that. And this is what you argue in your book, which is that bookstores basically emerge victorious from the pandemic, which kind of runs like. Which runs contrary to our expectations of most businesses during the pandemic. And there are specific reasons behind this, which you unpack in your pornograph. But let's start at the very beginning, which is what were the sort of challenges post by Amazon to bookstores in India? And then what do you think led to bookstores emerging victorious eventually? Sure.
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
I love the idea of my book having a happy ending. I think maybe it's like a happy. It's a happy middle. I really hope that this continues. But yeah, I think that this is really where my curiosity began because I wanted to be sure that I wasn't being overly optimistic. And as an aside, I have been seeing lately reports from the US and the UK that also say that the brick and mortar bookstore is kind of thriving after a slump. So it is nice to see that perhaps this is something that's happening across the world, perhaps for different reasons. In India, I would say that where my research sort of takes its starting point is in this period in about 23, 2014, 2015, where newspapers across the country were reporting what they called, quote, unquote, the death of the bookstore. Because it felt like everywhere you look, these iconic bookstores were shutting down, were unable to keep going. And many drew the link to what happened in 2013, which is that Amazon India began its operations. And I've talked about this a little bit, but I think it's very hard to deny that Amazon obviously had these enormous benefits that it could offer both the customer and the publisher. And for the customer, this was delivery anywhere in the country. And again, we come back to the fact that depending on where you live in India, you may not have access to a physical bookstore at all. And the physical bookstore you have access to may not stock the books that you want because of their own logistical issues in receiving stock. But Amazon could deliver very soon after it sort of started in India, it was delivering pretty much across the country. And of course, that enormous discounting possibility, which in a very price sensitive market, where actually the main market is not for trade books at all, it's not for fiction or general interest nonfiction like India shows these big numbers in terms of the book market. But that is primarily academic and educational. So you're already sort of looking at a niche audience and a very price sensitive audience. And in India, to this day, Amazon can pretty much discount books to ebby extent. In other markets, such as in Germany, where I am now, there are actually laws that fix the price of books so that there is no advantage to ordering a book from Amazon Germany versus your local bookstore. You will get a local book at the same price. But in India, the difference between ordering a book from Amazon versus a bookstore, that price difference could be immense. And so it makes sense that customers turned to Amazon. And as I said before, it also makes sense that publishers turn to Amazon because of these same advantages. They could sell more, they could receive data. And as we said, that's almost an impossibility in India. But an Amazon could tell you what your bestselling book was across the country. Nobody else could give that to you as a publisher. And so as they did in many markets, Amazon kind of hit the physical bookstore pretty hard. And I think this continued. And I'm not trying to say that Amazon is no longer an influential player because I think what it's brought to the bookselling and publishing landscape is kind of here to stay. But at the same time, what's really interesting when we kind of jump a decade forward into the start of the pandemic, is that that's the first time in India that Amazon's power could be slightly weakened, slightly checked. And that is because of the pandemic, which is a really terrible context. And I don't want to downplay all of the other awful things that were happening, but specifically in the context of bookselling, what did happen was that temporarily Amazon could not deliver books. It couldn't deliver them because we had an essential items only restriction, which meant that Amazon could really only deliver certain kinds of items and it also couldn't deliver books simply because of logistics. There were lockdowns happening at different times at different parts of the country. So a truck might physically not make it to its desired location. But during this time, bookstores were still open and they did have. They had the books on their shelves. Maybe they couldn't get new stock, but they had something that they could sell. They had an existing customer base. They had Instagram and WhatsApp and social media that they could use to advertise. They had these books sort of for the first time in a long time, they also had publishers all turning their support to these bookstores because publishers also wanted these books to be sold, also wanted to support the wider industry during this time. And so perhaps it was just a situation in which there was more visibility for the bookstore. One of the quotes in my research that I found really illuminating was a bookseller saying that those few weeks felt like returning to the quote, unquote, pre online era, that suddenly the relationship between publishers and booksellers felt like it did before there was another player in the game. And I think that was really sort of important and perhaps re establishing these strong connections between members of the publishing world and really getting them all to focus on. Because of course, the one element of the publishing field that everybody needs, if you're working in publishing, you need a place to sell your books. So it makes sense that the bookshop should be a priority. And maybe this was just an opportunity for everybody to make that clear to themselves and others.
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Karishma Kaushal
Yeah, that's actually. Yeah, that's so fantastic. The fact that you say that someone said that it felt like returning back to the pre online era. Because I was also like thinking about a couple of authors I was listening to were also talking about what publishing industry, the publishing industry in India looked like. And I think the world overlooked, like before Amazon and this digital revolution kind of came along, which is an industry of long lunches, but also good relations between all the various actors in the industry, such as booksellers and publishers and literary agents and authors. But it's yes, I think this, this turn that you talk about, which is kind of the return to a pre online era, this improving of relations between booksellers and publishers. It's also underpinned by a few things that you kind of discuss in your book. Right. Which is what happens between Amazon and Westland and what also happens with Amazon's changing priorities. And could we discuss that a bit more?
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
Sure. Without sort of going into it. I always find that with Indian talking about Indian publishing perhaps to an audience that doesn't know a lot about the Indian context. I don't know if you find this too involves describing about six or seven other things that you think are normal but are actually extremely unique to the Indian context. Which maybe comes back to the John B. Thompson quote about an unspoken grammar. But I suppose the short version would be that Amazon, across the world, Amazon opened as a bookstore. Right. That was its first priority and sort of everything else came after that. All of the other things, you can buy anything on Amazon now, but when it opened, it opened selling books. And I think across the world, across markets, you will see that of course those priorities have shifted. And the main what Amazon is trying to sell you now is very unlikely to be a book. They have 100 things that they would rather sell you. And I feel that those changing priorities becoming more evident during the same time period, post2020 and beyond, when Amazon was celebrating its sort of 10 year anniversary in the country and making announcements about future plans. Books were conspicuously absent in their the retail areas that they were looking at as growth areas. And I think that that's sort of happening at a time in which publishers and booksellers were kind of already rebuilt. I don't want to say rebuilding their relationship because I don't mean to suggest that this relationship didn't exist, but it's just again, it was a matter of timing in which these relationships were really thriving. With brick and mortar booksellers or brick and mortar bookstores across India becoming more visible, receiving more support, both from the public, so receiving more reader support, but also receiving more industry support in terms of various other members of the industry sort of explicitly saying support your local bookstore, maybe even nostalgically talking about the pre online era, really talking about the importance of this relationship in a way that maybe they hadn't talked about so visibly or so frequently before. And then at the same time you have Amazon kind of publicly talking about all of these other priorities and not the bookstore. And as you mentioned, there was also the case of Westland which was an Amazon owned publishing company that sort of overnight it was announced that that was going to be dissolved. Which was obviously they were an incredible publishing house doing amazing work. I'm so happy that they still exist in another avatar. But I think you can't underestimate or understate what it must have felt like to wake up to the news that this priority no longer existed and this incredible publishing house could no longer do the work that they were so good at doing. And so I think that also kind of caused a shift in relationship in the publishing field.
- [32:58]
Karishma Kaushal
Yeah, no, I completely understand that this, this, this loss of trust in Amazon because I remember, and I'm sure you do too, which is that when Westland, when the news of Westland broke, I think there was a lot of panic on the Internet and on Twitter about the author's rights and whether they'll be reverted back to them. What happens? Also Westland and its various imprints like Eka Context and Tranquiba were known for producing excellent literature in translation and in English and, and yeah, most exciting kinds of literature. So I think it really did like erode publishers trust in Amazon for a bit. I would like to believe. But yes, but I think, I think. Okay, so this concept of support your local bookstores, which now is everywhere and we see it, if we, if you could just with. There are two things about it, which is I think you track how publishers, sorry, how booksellers now in India, specifically the bookstores that you look at, kind of had this growing awareness of stating their politics and kind of, you know, asking for support and kind of also taking on a bit of activism to talk about independent book selling in India and how we must support it and just the concept of supporting your local bookstores, if you could unpack that for the listeners. And why should we A, support our local bookstores and B, what kind of led to this change in booksellers? And actually more than what, how did they really express their activism and kind of go out on social media and ask for this kind of support from their readers and buyers?
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Nayanthara Srinivasan
Yeah, thank you for asking that and also for like building in the chance for me to get on my soapbox and talk about supporting bookstores. This is something that I again find very fascinating in the Indian context simply because depending on, you know, your context, like depending on if you live in another country, this kind of rhetoric of the independent bookstore, the local bookstore might be very familiar. It's quite, you know, it's a normal way to talk about bookstores in the US for Example, and something that really helped me to understand this context was Laura J. Miller's work where she talks about what happened in the 1990s in the US when there was, as you were mentioning earlier, this sort of there was the local bookstore and then there was the big boxed bookstore. There was Barnes and Nobles or Borders kind of acting in the same way that maybe Amazon is acting now, just kind of cornering the market with discounting and running these local bookstores out of business. If you have watched the movie, you've got mail, you know what I'm talking about. But as an identity, independent bookstore didn't really, I'm not saying it was never used, but it was simply not a strong or coherent identity in India, both in my, like, anecdotal experience. And I don't know if that's the same for you when you think back to how we talk about bookstores, but also actually in the way that bookstores describe themselves in interviews on their websites, etc. And so this idea of what Lara J. Miller calls independent bookseller activism in the 1990s in the US is something I kind of transpose onto the Indian context because I think something that was happening alongside booksellers using social media to reach their customers was booksellers really using social media to explain why support a bookstore? Why support us at not another online click and purchase venue? And so bookstores were being very explicit about why you need to support them specifically and were using this term of the independent bookstore, sometimes also local bookstore, but more independent bookstore. And because this was occurring across different bookstores, social media channels, there were bookstores in Delhi talking about this. There were bookstores, stores in Bangalore talking about this. You know, any bookstore that you followed on social media was using this term independent bookstore, to talk about themselves. And so this identity kind of sort of emerged. And with this identity, there's also a call to action. Now, you support them because you are supporting then the faces that you are seeing on these bookstore social media accounts, they're explaining to you that they need to cover their employees salaries, that they need to cover rent. They're talking to you about the events that they hold, the author signings that they hold, all the different things that bookstores do in terms of their curation, in terms of their events, in terms of building community and why it's important to support that. And I think that was a very sort of valuable, was a very valuable exercise in maybe explaining to the average reader who might not think about this. And of course, like I've worked in the Industry. So I think about it all the time and you as well. But we also can't deny that why you don't think about where something else that you're buying is coming from. When I'm ordering, I don't know, a water bottle on Amazon, not necessarily thinking about it. And so it's also very possible that readers ordering their latest book on Amazon simply never thought before that, okay, if I can wait a couple of weeks extra maybe and order this from my local bookstore instead, this would make a tremendous difference to them.
- [38:48]
Karishma Kaushal
No, absolutely. I think as you point out quite rightly, India is such a price sensitive market, it's so hard to convince the average reader that they should support their local bookstore without discounts and without the instant gratification of receiving something in, in your at home in like two days. And that's why it's so interesting kind of these independent like publishers firstly describing themselves as independent and kind of using social media to reach out to readers and kind of forming these links with each other as well and with this conversation outside of India, like finding being a part of this moment in independent book selling and publishing. But yeah, I actually. And if we were just to kind of rewind and contrast this with what publish what book selling in the pre pandemic years was, we obviously know Amazon was one of the things that people say led to the demise of book selling for a bit all over the world perhaps in some ways. But even before that, I think around the 2010s we have bookstores like Crosswords. We had kind of these massive chains run by Reliance and a couple of other like corporations. But in general, like what, what, what were the reasons besides say Amazon that led to a decline in bookselling in the pre pandemic years?
- [40:12]
Nayanthara Srinivasan
Yeah, and it's also, this is also something that I found really interesting in my own research because I think it is so easy to kind of pick the one big, the one big villain, right? And be like, oh, clearly this is the one reason. But in many of these articles in the publishing and the Pandemic series and also elsewhere, when I was looking up why bookstores might close, there is a host of kind of more ordinary reasons which could also be quite significant. Rent. Rent is a really obvious one. Just rising rents that booksellers can't meet for whatever reason. Also sort of the changing, the changing makeup of neighborhoods. For example, there's one example in the series where a bookstore had to close because a cinema in the neighborhood shut down and cinema goers were like the main footfall for the bookstore because it was right nearby. And once there was no cinema in the location, footfall just dramatically dropped. Bookstores that have opened in malls talked about the difficulty of restocking their books in a mall because you can't have stock come in except outside of opening hours. And then you're paying more to have these trucks come in at night or very early in the morning. And again, these sound very small, but they're not. They are life or death to these bookstores. There's also an example in my research of a bookstore where the landlord just evicted them. Nobody knows why they were just evicted. They had nowhere to go. And so all of these small things are also and continue to happen. Rent is not getting any lower. Unplanned neighborhoods continue to be the way that India operates. And so I think all of those difficulties, of course when you have a physical space, these are the difficulties you're going to face. And then also the fact that so many of these bookstores are family run. And so you might just have, and this is me speculating, I don't have any concrete examples of this, but what if somebody else in your family just doesn't want to take on the bookstore after you? Then it might just close.
- [42:24]
Karishma Kaushal
No, absolutely. I think you're quite right. I think we had some examples of like family run bookstores that have really carried on their legacies and kind of created the social media presence that you talk so well about. But also some that are like, like in, in smaller cities that have completely gone out of business and now can only be like, or are only read about in kind of novels from a certain period or in people's recollections and memories. But yeah, and actually I think coming to a very basic question which is why should we turn our lens to book selling as readers? And why do you think kind of understanding and unpacking book selling is important for read for readers and, and kind of like for people working in the publishing studies to understand how book selling works. Why should we turn our lens to book selling at all? And what is the importance of this conversation?
- [43:23]
Nayanthara Srinivasan
I mean, I think it's kind of interesting in if you turn to publishing studies, there's recently there's an emerging body of research on bookselling and on bookstores, but it still continues to be historically understudied. And as we've sort of said a couple of times in this conversation, it's kind of shocking because the bookstore is so central to the entire publishing experience. If you don't have a way to get your Books into a reader's hands, the rest of it kind of falls apart. So bookstores are really central to the experience, but it's also very difficult to study them, partly because there are no archives, there are no bookstore archives. Well, in India there are very few publishing archives that we have access to, but at least in different markets, you might have really concrete places you can go to to study these different elements of publishing. You can go into the archives of a publisher or a literary agent, not so much of a bookseller. And so it is a sort of an understudied but really, really interesting place to turn your focus. And I think that it's something I feel very passionately about both because, well, my research has shown me that people still care about the bookstore, which I'm really happy about and I hope that continues. But I also think that academically we need to put that same emphasis on a really vital element of the publishing field. And that's something that I feel whenever I read any work about bookselling as well, is that, you know, there's so much to be said for how bookselling operates so differently in different places, under so many different sort of constraints. And it's just you. There's just so much to find out.
- [45:21]
Karishma Kaushal
Yeah, no, I completely understand that it's. You see a bookstore every day, but you don't understand that it's a part of this larger conversation on how like culture and literature perhaps is important and under attack also in so many parts of the world. So it is important to have these discussions. So, you know, I mean, we obviously, we've discussed this fantastic happy ending that your book has, which is that, you know, booksellers are doing well and that there's a growing consciousness amongst people that we must read and buy from independent bookstores and that in India things are not as bleak as one might think they would be. But are there any other issues that say bookstores still currently deal with? And what are these issues? How do they affect them? How do you think the field could evolve further?
- [46:13]
Nayanthara Srinivasan
Yeah, that's a great question. I guess. Despite the happy ending, I think that the threat of online retail is obviously still a concern, especially with online retail's ability to discount. And as we said before, in such a price sensitive market. I also find it hard to justify why you should buy a book from a bookstore if you can buy it for one, fix the price on an online platform. That's a difficult concern that I think gets talked about a lot within the industry. But it's going to continue to be a Concern also because it has been more than 10 years of online retail in the country, it's hard to change that kind of mindset. Although seeing more support for a physical bookstore is amazing, that I think not to come back to rent. But if you're a physical space, costs are definitely continuing to be a concern. A knock on effect of rising costs is also just from the sort of publishing point of view, costs are also rising, paper printing, et cetera, which might make, which does. Which has made books more expensive. And then that's also a difficulty for a bookseller who now has to sell books that are priced much higher and can't discount them as much as an online platform can. And then one more issue that sort of comes up in my research a little bit and is again unique maybe to an Anglophone market that is not the UK or the US is import costs. Because the way that English language publishing works in India is that you have the presence of these multinational conglomerates, your Penguin, random house, Hachette, HarperCollins, et cetera, and they publish Indian authors in English. So they publish books for the Indian market, but they also make available books published by their UK or US counterparts in India by either printing them locally if they have, if they can justify a big enough print run, or importing them. And that has sort of, it affects the price of these books. But it also leads to a situation in which, let's say I'm a bookseller and I see a really exciting new release from Penguin US and I know that my customers would really, really want to read this book, but the publisher isn't planning to import it. I have to request the publisher to import three or four copies just for me, just for my bookstore. And because of the way that book pricing and margins work, I'm going to have to import that at a higher price. So I'm going to have to sell those to my customers at a higher price. And it's going to take a couple of months and maybe there are logistical delays, maybe I don't get the books in time. And in that time my customer kind of grows impatient and just buys the book on Kindle or just buys it from another seller on Amazon. And now I have these five copies sitting in my store that took ages to get here and now I've lost my kind of readership for them. Or as a bookseller, I might want to sort of import or make available books from a really interesting independent publisher in the UK or the US and simply have no way to import them. And so I think those are Also sort of subtle but very frustrating constraints that booksellers have to work with that the average reader is just never going to know about.
- [49:59]
Karishma Kaushal
No, absolutely. There is such an information gap which is. We see now, for example, Fitzcarraldo editions are available in India, but there was a time when it was a bit tricky to get them in. There are like so many. There is, yeah, there is so much conversation. And obviously in India too, people follow things like the International booker and would want to read that. But not all books are immediately available. And yeah, it is true that they sometimes appear on Amazon before anywhere else and the average reader has no idea of their local and independent bookstores concerns in this sense. But yeah, this is, this has been a. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you. Nayan Dara. I think, I think, yeah, I think your work on bookstores is so illuminating for anyone who wants to look more closely at their local and independent bookstore and kind of. And also I feel as a manifesto in kind of organizing for independent book selling in India. So yeah, thank you so much and yeah, it was lovely to have you. We look forward to your future work in publishing and bookselling.
- [51:11]
Nayanthara Srinivasan
Thank you so much. It was so lovely to talk to you.
- [51:13]
Karishma Kaushal
Thank you.
- [51:15]
New Books Network Host
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