Pandemic effect: Online sales of books pick up momentum

kolkata: Publishing houses in the city observe satisfactory sales through online sites, with the help of social media marketing of books.

The market was shoved indoors as people were unable to step out during the two consecutive lockdowns owing to the spread of coronavirus in the city. During this time, an already booming online shopping helped lift sales of the publishers.

Since then online sales have become a separate department within the publishing houses, which now have a team dedicated to online publicity of books over social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

People have gotten habituated with ordering online, the president of Publishers and Booksellers' Guild Sudhangshu Dey said. Dey said that during a recent pop-up book fair by the Guild, he met an elderly couple who were glad for the books sale to be brought to their locality as they could hardly step out to buy books from stores physically.

There were instances where younger people would order books online for the elderly people. This constraint of movement assured high sales online but according to Dey, the sales remained high even after the lockdown was lifted and people could visit the stores physically.

Dey stated that his publishing house has sent parcels of books to buyers living in Dum Dum, Basirhat, Barasaat and even Bardhaman and outside the state to Bengaluru. The sale of fiction books remains high, amongst which genres like thriller, detective and horror tops the list.

Debajyoti Datta of Shishu Sahitya Sansad Private Limited agrees with the sale being satisfactory online. The total sale online is five to seven percent of the net sale.

According to Raju Barman of Rupa&Co, the online sales dropped slightly after the International Book Fair as more people started coming physically to stores in order to buy books.

During the pandemic not many new books were being published by the publication house. After gaining confidence from the increase in sales, they have started publishing 12-15 books per month.