NEW DLEHI, September 8: The days of bookselling are not history as yet. Books, in fact, are making history and are are the among the hottest selling items online. A recent survey by the Internet & Online Association of India (IOAI) and Cross Tab Marketing Services has found that books was the most popular category among online shoppers.
Unlike apparel or jewellery, books are not something buyers want to touch and feel before making a purchase. Most book-buyers already know what they want to buy. According to the online survey of Internet shoppers and their buying habits, 41 per cent of the respondents had bought books online, while 44 per cent indicated that they were likely to buy them in the near future.
So why are books such a hot item on the Internet? The main reason, the survey found, is that demand for books is actually growing by leaps and bounds. The country's publishing industry sold around Rs 3,000 cr worth of books in 2004-05.
Even though demand for books is growing, the retail trade has not kept pace with this growth. Organised bookstores account for just 10 per cent of the market and almost 98 per cent distribute only English-language books. So it is hardly surprising that book-lovers are turning to the Internet for their purchases. IOAI president, Preeti Desai, said: "Online bookstores provide a huge range of books that becomes difficult for the traditional neighbourhood bookstore to stock and sell. This gives consumers an almost endless choice in various categories and segments."
K. Vaitheeswaran, chief operating officer, Fabmall.com, felt that online bookstores have a distinctive advantage because books never go out of fashion. So online stores can keep adding titles to their collection until they have an inventory that is hard to beat. "Readers want to browse through large selections and web stores can deliver this. For example, the largest physical bookstores in India can offer only up to 70,000 titles � Fabmall.com has 2.5 million titles in its database," he says.
The metros continue to account for most online sales. Mumbai is the biggest market, accounting for 25 per cent of online sales, followed by Delhi with 18 per cent , Bangalore 8 per cent , Chennai 6 per cent, and Kolkata 4 per cent .
However, for online bookstores, the action in the future may come from elsewhere. The survey found that quite a large chunk (38 per cent) of buyers came from smaller towns and cities like Hyderabad/Secunderabad, Lucknow and Jaipur. Vaitheeswaran said this was because of the limited range offered by bookstores in these places since demand is not very high.
"We have found that the largest bookstores in places like Kottayam, Mysore and Cuttack keep only 5,000-10,000 books. What's more, a big part of these are school and college textbooks. So serious readers just cannot find enough to browse from in the local stores," he says.
Brick-and-mortar bookstores are using the Internet as an additional channel to push their products. According to Preeti Desai, this was evident when the latest Harry Potter novel was released in India. "Consumers who had pre-booked the books received them at home and did not have to queue up at the retail stores to pick up a copy," she said. Desai also felt that smaller publishers and marketers with limited budgets can reach out to larger markets through the Net. "It gives them a larger reach at a much lower cost." she added.
Vaitheeswaran adds that the key benefit of online selling for book publishers and marketers is forecasting demand. He points out an example: "We started taking pre-orders for the latest Harry Potter book three months in advance. When publishers contacted us a month prior to launch date, we had already booked confirmed orders for a few thousand � this helped them arrive at better demand forecasting."
As Internet penetration increases over the country, more and more people will buy books online. "We are seeing a faster adoption of this channel by not only large publishers and retailers, but also smaller publishers," says Preeti Desai. K. Sundararaman, Head Sales & Alliances, Sify Ltd, believes the benefits of online shopping will make it very popular. "Improved search capabilities with features like "search inside a book", etc will make buying books online a very pleasant experience. With robust fulfillment systems in place, the customer is assured of timely delivery," he says.
