1.1 The Logic of the Field

In 1987, the first large-format bookstore in the country, Landmark, opened in Chennai, south India, ‘transform[ing] organised book retail’ in the country.Footnote ²² In the 1990s, Landmark was a partner in the creation of Westland – a distribution company which imported English books into India and soon became the leading book distributor in the country.Footnote ²³ By 2005, Landmark was a successful chain with multiple outlets across the country, and was (perhaps inevitably) bought over by India’s largest conglomerate, the Tata group; Westland was acquired alongside.Footnote ²⁴ Under the Tata group, Landmark continued to expand, while Westland pivoted from distribution to publishing, launching a set of imprints.Footnote ²⁵ A little over a decade later, Westland would change hands once again: ‘to test interest in India’s books market’, Amazon acquired first a partial stake, and then complete ownership in 2016.Footnote ²⁶ By 2016, the era of Amazon had eclipsed that of the chain, and though Landmark continued to exist, its heyday was over. However, its influence in the book retail landscape had spread – over the years, former Landmark employees had gone on to launch other bookstores, including Odyssey, Fountainhead, and Crossword, currently India’s largest bookstore chain.Footnote ²⁷ Meanwhile, Westland would continue as a successful publishing house until February 2022, when Amazon announced that it would be shuttering the company overnight.Footnote ²⁸

As a portrait of one bookstore and its legacy – a history cobbled together from newspaper articles, obituaries, blogs, and interviews – the story of Landmark is also a story of the wider context of trade publishing in the 2000s and 2010s: an industry shaped by patterns of import and distribution, retail expansion, local publishing, and conglomerate and corporate takeovers. In other words, a focus on a single bookstore such as Landmark can serve to illuminate what Thompson terms ‘the logic of the field’, building on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field of cultural production to define the publishing industry as a space of plurality and relationality, dependent for its existence on access to, and traffic in, economic, symbolic, and social capital.Footnote ²⁹ In his examination of anglophone (largely American and British) trade publishing, Thompson identifies the logic of the field – the ‘set of factors that determine the conditions under which individual agents and organizations can participate in the field’Footnote ³⁰ – as defined by changes to the landscape of book retail; the growing influence of literary agents; and conglomeration within publishing corporations.Footnote ³¹ Although Thompson takes the publishing firm as his central focus, his mapping of the field of trade publishing is equally useful to an analysis of any agent or organisation involved in ‘the production, sale and distribution of this particular cultural commodity, the book’.Footnote ³² The brick-and-mortar bookstore is self-evidently crucial in what Thompson terms the supply and value chains within trade publishing.Footnote ³³ However, its position in the field is more complex; and the visibility, infrastructure, and value afforded to the bookstore – especially by those within the field – have implications for the overall landscape of book retail and publishing.

Bourdieu’s conception of the field has long been useful to scholars of book and publishing history interested in tracing the hierarchies and flows of symbolic and material value in a creative industry. For the purpose of this Element, however, I find working with Thompson’s framework particularly useful, both in identifying patterns of events and structural conditions which define the world of trade publishing and undergird the flows of capital within the industry, as well as in tracing these developments chronologically to note larger shifts within the field. Thompson suggests that the workings of the industry are particularly difficult to define, and often unclear even to those within it, likening the processes to ‘the grammar of a language: individuals know how to speak correctly … but they may not be able to formulate these rules in an explicit fashion’.Footnote ³⁴ My own interest in bookselling is influenced by my professional experience working in trade publishing in India between 2017 and 2021, and my first-hand observations of the complex, fragmented, and idiosyncratic bookselling landscape. Perceiving the logic of the field from within was, in my experience, identical to Thompson’s metaphor of an unspoken grammar. In this Element, therefore, I attempt what Thompson describes as the work of ‘an analyst of the world of publishing’:Footnote ³⁵ to view the field from an academic standpoint, and ‘discern some order in the plethora of details’Footnote ³⁶ by identifying some of the factors and dynamics – the logics of the field – that characterise brick-and-mortar bookselling in the country.

While my analysis follows Thompson’s mapping of the field, I refer to it as the ‘bookselling field’ in order to centre the focus of my analysis. As well, although the field encompasses a range of players and functions, I focus most closely on the relationship of the brick-and-mortar bookstore to two key entities: publishers and distributors, who form its two closest ‘links’ on the publishing chain. My analysis adopts a qualitative, mixed methods approach that, as Rachel Noorda and Stevie Marsden note, is common to twenty-first-century book studies, especially in explorations of the ‘economics of the book trade’.Footnote ³⁷ In the absence of comprehensive scholarship on Indian bookselling, this Element draw upon a range of primary sources, including trade publications as well as newspapers and digital news sites, as well as primary data in the form of booksellers’ posts on digital platforms, including Instagram, Twitter (now X), and bookstore websites. These different sets of information together offer a glimpse into the workings of the contemporary bookselling field and its transformation over the course of the pandemic.

2.1 The Logics of Brick-and-Mortar Bookselling

The threat posed to the brick-and-mortar bookstore by Amazon is a familiar story, but the way this story unfolds is influenced by the specific logics of the bookselling field in each market. In India, I suggest, contemporary brick-and-mortar bookselling is influenced by three factors: the relatively marginal place of trade publishing and bookselling; the fragmentation and uncertainty of brick-and-mortar bookselling; and the price-sensitive book market. These factors work together to characterise the bookselling field as a space of vulnerability and precariousness; in addition, they help to explain Amazon’s rapid near-monopoly and the period of the ‘death of the bookstore’.

To begin with, as Thompson notes, the world of publishing is made up of a ‘plurality of fields’Footnote ⁴⁹: with trade (general-interest fiction and non-fiction), academic, and educational publishing all defined by, and operating with, different processes. In India, the overall landscape features the added complexity of around 1,500 spoken languages, making English-language publishing a subset within a much larger context.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is important to note that – perhaps unusually, when compared to other markets – trade books form a minuscule segment of the overall book market in India. In terms of numbers, India is a massive market: in 2022, Nielsen reported that ‘India is ranked as the third-largest market in the world for print books and is the world’s second-biggest Englishspeaking [sic] economy’, pointing to its exceptionally young population and rising literacy rates.Footnote ⁵¹ English-language books make up a considerable proportion of these sales; however, the market is overwhelmingly dominated by academic, rather than trade, publishing; in 2022, for instance, sales of trade books contributed to a mere 3.7% of India’s publishing revenue, with the remaining 93.3% coming from educational publishing.Footnote ⁵² Thus, although the absolute numbers make India appear to be one of the world’s most attractive book markets, and anglophone trade publishing in the country is represented by both international conglomerates as well as local firms, the actual place of trade publishing is fractional; Charkin describes India as ‘a relative minnow on the international stage’.Footnote ⁵³

Naturally, this has had consequences for bookselling. In 2015, Nielsen estimated that there were about 21,000 book retailers in India, of which only 1800 – about 8.5% – were identified as ‘trade outlets’; the rest sold solely educational books.Footnote ⁵⁴ In other words, just as anglophone trade publishing occupies a relatively minor position within the overall book market – at least in terms of numbers – so too does the anglophone trade bookstore. For publishers, these challenges are arguably mitigated by conglomeration, organisation, and economies of scale. While the chain bookstore might share some of these advantages, the stand-alone bookstore does not; trade brick-and-mortar bookstores thus find themselves in a relatively marginalised position within the publishing landscape, simply by virtue of the overall makeup of the book market. This vulnerability is compounded by the fragmentation and uncertainty involved in brick-and-mortar bookselling, perhaps best exemplified by the logistics of the publishing supply chain, which scholarly and industry reports concur is one of the main challenges in the Indian market. As previously mentioned, trade publishers are concentrated in the Delhi-NCR area; this is also true of printing presses.Footnote ⁵⁵ In India, as in other book markets, books move from the presses to distributors, who then supply stock to book retailers. Given the size of the country, this means that the first crucial steps of the supply chain – from publisher to printer to warehouse to retailer – require multiple stakeholders, layers of logistics, and significant time. This staggered process involves multiple ‘logistical problems such as warehousing, transportation, inventory, recovery of dues from bookstores and bookstore locations that are difficult to access’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a result, distribution is unevenly efficient, with more problems faced by non-urban centres and smaller towns ‘where the distribution value chain is highly fragmented and requires substantial lead-time before books reach the end user’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As a result, booksellers have observed that the biggest distributors tend to concentrate on sourcing from large publishers, making it more difficult for bookstores to acquire books from smaller or independent presses.Footnote ⁵⁸ The long payment cycles created by this extended chain, combined with the idiosyncratic ‘sale-on-return’ policy which continues to be followed in bookselling worldwide, make the economics of bookselling tricky and uncertain, and can even cause publishers to choose not to supply books to certain bookstores in response to frequent delays in payment.Footnote ⁵⁹ As a result, to varying degrees, all brick-and-mortar bookstores face challenges in predicting, coordinating, and maintaining a supply of books.

These issues of prediction and coordination form another major challenge in the Indian book market, which is beset by a notorious lack of data, not only in scholarly discussion, but also within the industry itself; as Thomas Abraham – currently managing director of Hachette India – notes, ‘[t]here is alas no reliable data whatsoever for trade market sizes from 1947 or even … recent decades’.Footnote ⁶⁰ While the World Intellectual Property Organization report for 2022 states that Nielsen BookScan, the industry standard for sales data, covers ‘a significant part of the organized market’, Abraham estimates the numbers at ‘about 50–65 per cent of the market depending on the type of book’, and suggests using an ‘extrapolation multiplier of about 1.5x’ for more accurate data on book sales.Footnote ⁶¹ Trade publishing also lacks the institutional frameworks that are present in an educational or academic context; these books are not ordered by educational institutions or prescribed on syllabi. Practically speaking, this means that a significant amount of expenditure and labour is involved in tracking bookstore sales; in the absence of online data, distributors and publishers rely on informal communication between their sales representatives and booksellers in order to gain data on stock and sales.Footnote ⁶² Bookseller Subodh Sankar points out that this activity, too, is limited to metropolitan cities; elsewhere, publishers tend to track the number of copies sold to distributors, rather than those sold by bookstores, and thus have ‘zero visibility about secondary sales’ – that is, actual sales to customers.Footnote ⁶³ With no organised data on bookstore sales, the exact number of functioning bookstores in the country is equally uncertain. This results in a vicious cycle for bookselling: the degree of this historic lack of data is its own deterrent against the industry investing more money or labour in producing this data; and as a result, the book market remains disorganised and fragmented. Anish Chandy, a publishing professional, argues that the problem is systemic: ‘the underlying model of selling books offline is shaky’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Any effort to combat these challenges would, therefore, require considerable investment in transforming an entire industry.

This investment might not be immediately forthcoming for a number of reasons. Questions of money are always a concern in trade bookselling; in India, this is compounded not just by its minor place within the larger publishing industry and the fragmentation of its supply chain, but also by the extraordinary price-sensitivity of the market. In fact, ‘one of the most distinctive aspects of the vast market in India [is] a traditionally low price point’.Footnote ⁶⁵ A Nielsen survey conducted in 2020 saw respondents estimate their preferred retail price for a paperback at between 200 to 400 rupees (that is, roughly, between £2 and £4).Footnote ⁶⁶ Abraham similarly estimates that a paperback priced at £9.99 in the UK would retail in India for around £4.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the same time, publishers’ costs have only continued to grow, with sharp increases in the price of paper, fuel, and freight over the last decades.Footnote ⁶⁸ While India does not have a system enforcing a fixed price for books, it does enforce a ‘maximum retail price’ or MRP, which must be printed on commodities including books; this prevents retailers from charging more than the printed price.Footnote ⁶⁹ For trade publishing, which already forms such a small component of the total book market, the possibility of raising prices is slim, and publishers often choose to incur lower margins or even losses instead.Footnote ⁷⁰ On their part, brick-and-mortar booksellers face other rising costs, such as rent, and have no power to adjust book prices in response; as Anish Chandy notes, ‘[t]he offline retailer is the most vulnerable entity in this cycle’.Footnote ⁷¹ Taken together, then, the field of English-language trade bookselling in India is characterised by a fractional market share; a fragmented landscape with no infrastructure in place to record either book retailers or book sales; a system of warehousing and distribution which poses both monetary and logistical inefficiencies; and a highly price-sensitive readership.

These factors – present in the earliest forms of organised bookselling in India – continue to shape the industry in the present day. However, from the 2010s onwards, the field was dramatically altered by the introduction of an alternative to the uncertainty, disorganisation, and economic constraints of physical bookselling, with the introduction of a retail system that could promise instant data, effortless logistics, and high discounts. The next section explores the ways in which Amazon’s arrival in the Indian context quickly led to a monopoly of online retail, exacerbating the challenges faced by brick-and-mortar bookstores.

2.2 The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore in the Age of Amazon

In The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas suggests that ‘[r]ather than referring to Amazon.com as an online or Internet bookseller, perhaps it would be more apt to call it a large-scale, direct-to-consumer warehouse bookseller’, a perspective he sees as essential in placing ‘warehouses or order-fulfilment facilities center stage, where they belong’.Footnote ⁷² This statement is perhaps especially relevant in the Indian context, where the origin story of Amazon is linked most strongly to its warehousing and logistical efficiencies. When setting up Amazon in the United States, Jeff Bezos famously made the decision to focus on books precisely because of their systems of organisation, such as the internationally adopted ISBN code and inventory processes.Footnote ⁷³ However, as the previous section has demonstrated, these systems barely existed in the Indian context; bookselling and publishing continued to lack infrastructure or data processes even as of 2013. In addition, the India of 2013 was a cash economy; its citizens were far from digitally native, with barely 30% of Indians possessing an internet connection; and, most significantly, governmental policies prevented ‘foreign multibrand retailers from selling directly to consumers online’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, when Amazon arrived in India, it did so in the guise of a third-party aggregator rather than a bookstore. In an article announcing its launch, the BBC described its operations as follows: ‘[s]ellers send their goods to Amazon’s warehouse near Mumbai. When an order is placed, Amazon packs and sends the order to the customer’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a similar vein, the country manager of Amazon India declared that their initial vision was ‘to become a trusted and meaningful sales channel for retailers of all sizes across India’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Striphas’s observation that Amazon is a warehouse, and not a bookseller, is thus true in its most literal sense in the Indian context.

Importantly, Amazon also adjusted its business model in other ways, adapting to the aforementioned idiosyncrasies of the Indian market. In the initial years, Amazon introduced cash-on-delivery payment options, a first for the company; in addition, they offered a version of the app that was compatible with lower internet speeds, and expanded to other local languages.Footnote ⁷⁷ Perhaps most conveniently, though, Amazon’s positioning as a ‘marketplace’ meant that the company could insist that pricing decisions were out of its control – this was ostensibly left up to the individual retailers, or ‘sellers’, as Amazon termed them. The result of these decisions was inevitable. Amazon India might have had to follow a different playbook from other territories, but its impact on book retail, at least, was ultimately familiar; by 2015, just two years after its entry into the market, 50% of English-language trade bookselling was taking place online.Footnote ⁷⁸

Given that brick-and-mortar bookselling was beset by a lack of data and organisation, it is perhaps unsurprising that the publishing industry saw benefits in the Amazon model. By virtue of its logistical reach – and its ability to offer discounts that bookstores could not match – Amazon could serve more readers than the country’s entire physical bookselling ecosystem could manage. Recognising the historical problems with warehousing and distribution, Amazon had focused on expansion of storage space from its earliest days. By 2015, they were able to deliver to almost every pincode in the country.Footnote ⁷⁹ By 2021, the company had ‘more than 60 fulfilment centers … offering 43 million cubic feet to its sellers’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The disorganised network of brick-and-mortar bookstores in the country could not possibly make such promises; nor did they have marketing budgets to compare with Amazon and Flipkart, who could run front-page advertisements advertising their exclusive deals for bestsellers.Footnote ⁸¹ As publishers prioritised Amazon, the effects were seen across the field. For example, distributors saw disruptions in their business as publishers chose to deal directly with Amazon retailers; this meant that online ‘sellers’ would now buy books directly from the publisher, and their stock would be managed by Amazon’s fulfilment centres rather than distributor warehouses, as was the norm for brick-and-mortar bookselling.Footnote ⁸² From the point of view of the consumer, the value of Amazon – convenience, affordability, range, access – was self-evident. While Amazon could maintain that it had no control over the deep discounting on its site, there was no doubt that these discounts were present, and heavily advertised, across the platform, which was ‘willing to take a loss on each transaction in order to grow its customer base’.Footnote ⁸³ Alongside lowered prices, Amazon could also offer a wider range of titles; not just because they faced no constraints in physical shelf space, but also because they could more easily import titles from the UK or the United States, ‘as they [received] enough orders to make the air freight economical’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Consequently, the years between 2013 and 2020 saw a series of transformations in the brick-and-mortar bookselling landscape. Thomas Abraham vividly summarises the consequences of ‘deeper discounts and the scorched-earth policy’ of e-retailers on brick-and-mortar bookselling from 2013 onwards:

Abraham is oddly hesitant to point to the influence of Amazon as a certainty; however, it is undeniable that the meteoric ascent of Amazon went hand-in-hand with the ‘death of the bookstore’; as bookstores across the country continued to close, online retail could only move closer to monopoly. Amazon had quickly grown to become a key player in the field, and its presence as the largest, most powerful bookstore in the country seemed impossible to deny, challenge, or escape. Then, in 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a new set of variables which would crucially alter some of these logics.

2.3 The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had both immediate and long-lasting effects on the retail and creative sectors worldwide. In India, pandemic measures were both swift and harsh, taking the form of a complex series of extensive lockdowns. The first nationwide lockdown, ‘Lockdown 1.0’, lasted from 25 March to 14 April 2020; this was subsequently extended in three further phases, lasting until 31 May 2020. During the first two lockdowns, there was a complete prohibition of all industry, commercial activity, or transit, with the exception of what would come to be called ‘essential services’: food, banking, telecommunication, and utilities, among others.Footnote ⁸⁶ Significantly, ‘e-commerce delivery services’ faced similar restrictions, and were only allowed to sell a limited set of goods on their platforms during this time.Footnote ⁸⁷ This stands in contrast to other book markets, where sites like Amazon could continue to sell all products; as Claire Squires observes, in territories such as the UK ‘there really was no threat at all to … access to books online’ during the pandemic.Footnote ⁸⁸

Later phases of lockdowns in May added a new layer of complexity, as individual states were divided into ‘containment zones’, classified as red, orange, and green zones based on the number of infections in the neighbourhood.Footnote ⁸⁹ Malls and shopping centres remained closed across all zones, but ‘standalone (single) shops, neighbourhood (colony) shops and shops in residential complexes … in urban areas’ were now permitted to open in lower-risk areas, ‘without any distinction of essential and non-essential’; however, e-commerce was still restricted to ‘essential goods’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Transport was similarly complex. In red zones, ‘[m]ovement of individuals and vehicles’ was restricted to ‘permitted activities’; orange zones allowed ‘[i]nter-district movement’ for ‘permitted activities’; and green zones permitted ‘inter-state movement of goods’ without restriction.Footnote ⁹¹ Finally, from 8 June 2020 onwards, a three-phase ‘Unlock’ was announced, with the gradual lessening of all restrictions. A night-time curfew remained in effect, but at all other times there was ‘no restriction on inter-State and intra-State movement of persons and goods’.Footnote ⁹²

These restrictions had a profound and unexpected effect on the book trade, as the logistical complexities that previously challenged brick-and-mortar bookselling began to work, somewhat ironically, in its favour. The initial strict lockdowns naturally adversely affected the brick-and-mortar bookstore; but, unlike markets like the UK, where books were still just a click away, in India the ‘essential services’ mandate was extended to online retail. As restrictions began to ease, stand-alone shops – which included many bookstores across the country – were allowed to operate within their neighbourhood ‘zones’, while e-commerce continued to be restricted to essential services. Even as these restrictions on online retail were lifted, the logistics of the supply chain began to come into play. If warehouses were located in containment zones, no movement was possible; furthermore, inter-district and inter-state travel was complicated, requiring permits, and subject to change on short notice if states or districts saw an uptick in infection, which would mean that they were ‘re-zoned’. Then there was the question of labour. Public transport for private citizens was still banned, which meant that warehouse workers and truck operators – many of whom, as migrant workers, had returned to their hometowns – had no way of reporting to work.Footnote ⁹³ Consequently, once Amazon was allowed to make deliveries, whether essential or non-essential, its logistical advantages no longer existed. The size of the country also meant that policies issued by the centre were not necessarily followed by individual states, with reports throughout all phases of trucks being detained by the police or local authorities.Footnote ⁹⁴ In addition, India would continue to tighten measures as infection rates periodically surged, as with the particularly harsh second wave in early 2021.Footnote ⁹⁵

It is not unusual that COVID-19 disrupted retail supply chains; but it is significant that its occurrence in India led to a situation in which, at least for a brief period of time, the brick-and-mortar bookstore was at a comparative advantage to the e-commerce giant. As stand-alone stores were allowed to open, bookstore workers could go in to work, and had access to some stock, however limited: the books on their shelves. This advantage did not last long; and it occurred during an uncertain, challenging, inopportune moment. Nevertheless, I argue that this was a key factor which would go on to transform the logic of the field of contemporary brick-and-mortar bookselling.

3.1 Publishing, the Pandemic, and the Bookselling Landscape

Soon after the first article in ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’ was published, the series began to grow quickly, with articles published regularly across 2020 and 2021; at its peak, an average of twenty articles per month were published between May and December 2020. The series curator, Kanishka Gupta, is an important figure in Indian trade publishing, as a leading literary agent whose authors have won prestigious literary awards; in 2020, an author he represents was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.¹¹⁰ Perhaps as a result of Gupta’s own place within the industry, the series is notably representative in reach and breadth, and addresses an impressive range of subjects. Interestingly, these articles are also made available to a wide audience: Scroll is a news website with a general readership, rather than an industry-facing publication, and while there are no recent statistics on readership, in 2016 the website received almost four million unique visits per month.¹¹¹

The articles across the series can broadly be grouped into the following categories, based on the primary focus of each piece (see Table 1). As might be expected, the largest proportion of articles discuss the wider impact of COVID-19 on the entire industry. This is a wide-ranging category, with articles focusing on a range of specific organisations and individuals, including book reviewers, literary agents, freelance workers, women in publishing, printing presses, and book cover designers, among others. Several articles focus on community libraries and archives as well as consecratory institutions such as literary prizes and festivals, and a significant proportion consist of personal essays by writers, excerpts from published fiction and non-fiction, and general discussions of books and literature, such as articles on how the pandemic might affect genre trends.

Table 1Categories featured within ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’

A relatively small number of articles consider readership, looking specifically at book clubs in different Indian cities; and a sombre collection pays tribute to the memory of publishing figures who lost their lives in the pandemic. As the series focuses on the larger context of publishing in the subcontinent, there are also a number of articles discussing publishing in local languages as well as in countries outside of India, most prominently Pakistan and Bangladesh.Footnote ⁹⁹ Most significantly, from the point of view of this Element, physical bookselling appears to be a prime category, making up 15% of all articles within the series; there are no articles that focus specifically on Amazon or e-retail. Going purely by the numbers, it might seem as if bookselling occupies a high-priority spot within the series – and, by extension, plays a vital role in the industry. This prominent presence is logical: retail was the first and hardest-hit sector of the industry; the closure of bookstores affected every step of the publishing chain, from author to reader; and to the series’ general readership, the bookstore is perhaps the most familiar element of the world of publishing (outside of the book). However, looking more closely at the content of the articles, a somewhat different picture emerges.

In a September 2020 article in the series, ‘Will the pandemic enable us to imagine our cities with more bookstores?’, publisher and bookseller Sudhanva Deshpande writes: ‘How many bookstores does Delhi have? Sadly, no one knows, and it is hard to even hazard a guess’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Deshpande speaks of a single city – the capital of the country, in which much of the trade publishing industry is concentrated – and yet points out that nobody in the industry can accurately capture its bookselling landscape. The lack of data reinforces the role of this series as an important intervention in making brick-and-mortar bookstores more visible to both the industry and the general public. In some cases, ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’ is the first major record of certain bookstores; for example, it contains the earliest online mention of Sudarsan Books in Nagercoil, south India.Footnote ¹⁰¹ At the same time, though, the series also makes visible the patterns of fragmentation and unevenness present throughout the bookselling landscape of the country.

Although bookselling is the subject of a significant proportion of the series, it is clear from the start that the landscape under discussion is an incomplete one. Accounting for all mentions of English-language bookstores across the series still results in a map in which large sections of the country, particularly in the central and north-western regions, remain completely unaddressed. These gaps in the map persist even when factoring in Crossword outlets across the country (the chain, somewhat surprisingly, is not discussed within the series).Footnote ¹⁰² Significantly, this unevenness is reinforced by first-person accounts throughout the series. Deshpande, for example, describes the situation in Delhi, a city with ‘a population as large as that of Bulgaria’ where English-language bookstores are concentrated in the central and southern regions, requiring people in other neighbourhoods to travel a considerable distance to access a physical bookstore.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this respect, Delhi is at an advantage; a bookseller from Bhubaneswar, the capital city of the eastern state of Odisha, states that ‘[m]illions of people in our country have never been inside a bookstore’, citing interactions with customers who have only encountered books in classrooms.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In other cities, bookstores are anomalies – the town of Mussoorie in north India has only one general bookstore, as does Patna, the capital city of Bihar.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Across the country, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the town of Nagercoil saw its first trade bookstore open ‘[a]t the turn of the millennium’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Hyderabad, a metropolitan city with 6.8 million residents, could boast of only one remaining independent bookstore as of 2020.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And even a single bookstore is an advantage; the organiser of a book club in Rampur – a city barely 200 kilometres from Delhi – begins her article in the series with the statement, ‘There are no bookstores in Rampur.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Among publishing scholars and literacy activists, the phrase ‘book desert’ is often used to denote neighbourhoods with low average book ownership;Footnote ¹⁰⁹ the information gained across this series suggests that large sections of India are bookselling deserts.

The omission of Crossword in these discussions is also a reminder that ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’ is not an empirical dataset, but a curated series; as such, it is worth noting that the makeup of the bookstores that do find mention within these articles are overwhelmingly concentrated in urban, metropolitan cities. Table 2 lists the number of times a specific city is mentioned in a discussion of brick-and-mortar bookstores within the series. This table lists the number of times each city is featured, rather than unique mentions of bookstores; thus, while bookstores in Delhi are mentioned twenty times within the series, a handful of bookstores – three of them sharing the same pincode – receive multiple features. As the table shows, representation within the series is skewed towards major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, reinforcing the fact that some regions of the country receive substantially more attention than others.

Table 2Cities mentioned in connection with brick-and-mortar bookstores

This disproportionality also implies other inequalities; for example, it is likely that metropolitan cities do have more bookstores, and these are likely to be more better connected in terms of transport, making stock delivery from distributors and visits from publishers’ sales representatives easier. These bookstores are also likely to have more capital – economic, social, symbolic – all of which work together to provide, and sustain, their visibility and power, while other bookstores might be neglected or even unknown to members of the industry. Deshpande observes in his article that ‘[w]e really cannot have cities where populations the size of small nations are not serviced by bookstore’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ but the series suggests that this appears to be precisely the state of contemporary bookselling in 2020 – with a limited range of bookstores in a limited set of regions commanding the bulk of attention, as well as clear biases that exist within the industry in terms of which bookstores receive attention and visibility. And, even where brick-and-mortar bookstores do exist, their existence is precarious – a fact that is reiterated throughout accounts by booksellers, who list a host of factors affecting their survival that extend before, throughout, and beyond the pandemic.

3.2 ‘Deeper Cultural and Systemic Problems’: Bookselling before the Pandemic

From the first article of the series – which observes that ‘once the virus had entered India, orders for books from brick-and-mortar bookshops almost halved’Footnote ¹¹¹ – ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’ explores many of the factors that affected the book trade, from debating the question of whether books should be classified as ‘essential commodities’ to the challenge of bookstores having to continue to pay rents and salaries and the impact of lockdowns on the logistics of receiving and making deliveries.Footnote ¹¹² As lockdowns began to ease, booksellers and publishers worried about whether customers would return to buying books offline, and what ‘the new normal’ would look like.Footnote ¹¹³ These discussions are largely similar to those taking place across book markets globally, as several territories dealt with identical issues of ‘essential service’ mandates, supply chain disruptions, and lowered footfall in retail.Footnote ¹¹⁴ At the same time, though, accounts from booksellers across the series also emphasise that many of the challenges they face pre-date the pandemic, with a lack of visibility, organisation, and legal protections contributing to their marginalisation in the field.

In The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas reminds scholars to consider the ‘banal circumstances’ that might explain bookstore closures, rather than assuming a single villain such as the big-box bookstore – or, from the perspective of this Element, Amazon or the pandemic.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Booksellers’ accounts within the series are a testament to this reminder: looming largest across these accounts, far larger than the threat of e-commerce or the pandemic, is the question of rent. This affects booksellers across the country, from Full Circle in Delhi’s Khan Market – which counts amongst the twenty-five most expensive retail locations in the worldFootnote ¹¹⁶ – to smaller locations, such as a bookstore in Bhubaneswar whose ‘small shack’ was destroyed by the authorities, and whose landlord evicted them ‘to make way for a restaurant’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Higher rents are accompanied by regulatory restrictions; for example, Ajay Mago, the owner of a chain of bookstores in malls across north India, points out that these costs are compounded by the maintenance charges levied by malls. Alongside this, stock deliveries cannot be made during the mall’s working hours, ‘which means an additional cost’ involved in supplying his stores.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Higher rents can also have a knock-on effect: the owner of a bookstore in Kolkata, Mohan’s Bookshop, states that sales were adversely affected when a cinema that used to be located directly opposite the store was forced to close down, drastically affecting footfall; the bookstore closed during the pandemic.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Rent is, admittedly, an obvious factor which necessarily affects all physical retail, but it is nevertheless a key ‘banal circumstance’ that cuts across the bookselling landscape, irrespective of the visibility or social capital that the bookstore might command. As bookstores are also scattered across the country, largely stand-alone and family-run, this leaves them particularly vulnerable to economic precariousness – which would only be exacerbated by the pandemic.

The system of distribution and import, too, is a ‘banal circumstance’ that adds to the bookstore’s vulnerability. Though distribution has long been a challenge in the trade, booksellers’ first-person accounts in this series make clearer some of the specific complexities in these processes. Raman Shresta, the owner of Rachna Books in the northern state of Sikkim, outlines his experience of receiving stock:

Shresta’s narration involves multiple factors – availability, time, labour, and political and environmental conditions – each of which involves additional cost. It also reiterates the split that emerges between the relatively advantaged bookstores in well-connected cities, and those more far-flung. The challenges he outlines are likely to be faced by bookstores in other, less-connected regions of the country; in addition, the logistical uncertainty is compounded by higher costs of delivery, further affecting bookstores’ ability to match the high discounts of online retailers such as Amazon. Shresta’s account is a valuable illustration of the multifaceted infrastructural challenges that continue to shape bookselling and publishing in the country, and bookstores’ dependence upon multiple infrastructural conditions that are out of their hands (and, perhaps, beyond the control of the publishing industry as a whole).

To further complicate matters, even where logistical systems are smooth, brick-and-mortar bookstores face another challenge related to distribution. Acquiring English-language books – many of which are published in the United States or UK and imported into India – is a fraught issue. Mahika Chaturvedi and Sonal Narain, booksellers at The Book Shop, New Delhi, point to the problem of ‘import rights [conditions] arbitrarily thrust upon brick and mortar stores but not applicable to online sellers’.Footnote ¹²¹ As they explain, books published by independent presses in the United States or UK can only be ordered by bookstores if they are distributed in India through a ‘big five’ publisher. Presses who are not distributed in this way, especially American presses such as Dalkey Archive and Carcanet, cannot be directly imported by bookstores, in what they call ‘one area where we are still colonized under the commonwealth trade laws’.Footnote ¹²² Re-sellers, however, are free to make these books available on platforms like Amazon.Footnote ¹²³ In other words, whether the problem is of logistics of delivery or of import, the brick-and-mortar store faces constraints in supply; and, as the booksellers at The Book Shop observe, in both cases the online retailer stands to benefit.

This last point forms a third challenge echoed by booksellers across the board: the concern that ‘there is no policy framework … to protect independent businesses against the unhinged expansion of e-retailers’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The lack of legal protections makes brick-and-mortar bookstores particularly vulnerable, even in comparison to other sectors of retail, which have more robust trade associations or organised bodies to lobby for their cause. The owner of Wayword and Wise, a bookstore in Mumbai, uses his article to highlight the ‘deeper cultural and systemic problems’ caused by ‘the lack of government support and protection for the book trade’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Throughout the series, booksellers and publishers also call attention to the absence of any regulations governing book pricing, such as the Lang Law followed in France.Footnote ¹²⁶ The disorganised landscape, economic precariousness, and absence of regulatory frameworks is a potent combination – but, in fact, the series points to an even more significant factor that threatens the survival of the brick-and-mortar bookstore: its marginalisation within the publishing field.

3.3 ‘Systemic Lack of Support’: Bookselling in the Field

Describing the state of bookselling in November 2020, Anish Chandy remarks, ‘bookstores have been suffering for years. The pandemic has become the shove off the cliff’.Footnote ¹²⁷ As discussed earlier, Amazon undoubtedly played a pivotal role in this suffering, resulting in a spate of bookstore closures long before the pandemic. Throughout this series, however, what emerges more clearly is the role that others in the field, such as publishers and distributors, have played in the ‘age of Amazon’. Most importantly, the series makes visible a gradual change in attitudes towards brick-and-mortar bookselling, signalling the beginning of a transformation in the field.

Unsurprisingly, booksellers throughout the series are vocal about the effects of Amazon on physical retail. Priyanka Malhotra, the owner of Full Circle, New Delhi, remarks that ‘[b]ookstores have suffered immensely with online retail giants with deep pockets … monopolizing the segment’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Ajit Vikram Singh, a former bookseller whose store closed before the pandemic, concurs that readers’ clear preference for Amazon’s pricing and convenience has led to a ‘dark and uncertain’ future for the physical bookstore.Footnote ¹²⁹ Multiple booksellers narrate the familiar story of customers photographing books to order online for a lower price.Footnote ¹³⁰ To booksellers, the threat posed by Amazon is clear, and their perspectives are largely a continuation of discussions of ‘the death of the bookstore’. More than booksellers’ opinions of Amazon, though, the largest impact on brick-and-mortar bookselling arguably comes from the attitudes held by every other player in the field; a reduction of Amazon’s power would require publishers, distributors, and writers to prioritise the brick-and-mortar bookstore. In this respect, it is worth asking where and how those in the wider publishing field speak about both bookstores and online retail within ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’. Once again, going purely by the numbers paints a rosier picture: bookstores were mentioned in 49% of all articles focusing on anglophone trade publishing, and Amazon in only 30%. But a mention of brick-and-mortar bookstores does not necessarily reflect an investment in their survival. And, in fact, where individuals in the field apart from booksellers – publishers, distributors and writers, among others – speak of bookstores, this largely consists of an offhand reference to bookstore closures in the pandemic (‘online and offline sales have hit rock bottom’Footnote ¹³¹). Only 8% of articles by non-booksellers include more than three sentences discussing bookstores; in the overwhelming majority of the dataset, physical bookstores find only a passing mention. In fact, some articles that are framed as surveys of the publishing industry interview, or reference, every agent in the publishing field except the bookseller.Footnote ¹³² It would appear that to the industry, bookstores are simultaneously recognised as essential – their closure being worthy of mention by nearly every player in the field – and yet treated as marginal, afforded no extended discussion.

When it comes to Amazon and online retail, on the other hand, publishers, distributors, and authors often have more to say. The owner of a self-publishing platform, for example, asserts that ‘more and more authors are realising the benefits of e-commerce over the physical bookstore, and are happy to see their printed books [on] online marketplaces’.Footnote ¹³³ In another telling example of Amazon’s influence on the wider field, Gaurav Sabharwal, the managing director of Wonder House Books – an imprint set up by Prakash Books, one of India’s largest trade distributors – explicitly links his publishing strategy to Amazon:

In both these cases, Amazon (or online marketplaces more generally) are spoken of in terms of benefits to the publisher, author, and customer; in Sabharwal’s framing, Amazon helps publishers better meet readers’ demands. Both articles, in fact, speak negatively of the brick-and-mortar bookstore; the interview with Sabharwal links Wonder House’s ‘success story’ to its ability to overcome ‘the limitation of bookstores’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Interestingly, Sabharwal refers to Amazon in another article in the series, this time in his capacity as a distributor. Highlighting its detrimental effect on distribution, as Amazon’s popularity led to dwindling orders from brick-and-mortar bookstores, Sabharwal nevertheless does not suggest fighting this monopoly; instead, he says, ‘as distributors, we can be sellers on Amazon too, if we can figure out how to integrate in the right way’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Rather than challenging the power of Amazon, or supporting brick-and-mortar bookstores, players in the field are willing to invest money in maintaining its status. In another article, the director of the JCB Prize for Literature, one of India’s most prestigious literary awards, states matter-of-factly that during the pandemic, when ‘the usual elements of real-life promotion in bookshops’ were a challenge, the prize simply chose to partner with Amazon.Footnote ¹³⁷ Examples such as these illustrate a field in which Amazon’s monopoly is either taken for granted – discussed simply as an immovable feature of the landscape of bookselling – or explicitly supported by members of the industry.

Thus, beyond the direct effects of Amazon’s own policies, bookstores are also marginalised as a result of the lack of support within the industry, a theme echoed by booksellers across the series. In her account of setting up an independent bookstore in Bengaluru, Radhika Timbadia observes, ‘[w]hen prestigious literary festivals in India call booksellers from outside India to speak about their experiences, and not anyone within from India … it makes me wonder whether we can all come together to have a stronger voice and support each other’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The owners of Bahrisons, a set of bookstores in New Delhi, echo these sentiments, stating that a ‘bookshop is no singular effort … It is as much the effort of the bookseller as it is of the author, publisher, salesperson and the reader’.Footnote ¹³⁹ The booksellers at The Book Shop, New Delhi, are much more explicit, declaring that ‘the systemic lack of support shown by publishers’ is a problem which ‘beset[s] the entire bookselling community’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In Merchants of Culture, Thompson proposes the idea of the ‘polarization of the field’, split between a small number of powerful conglomerates and a large number of ‘very small publishing operations’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Arguably, a similar kind of ‘polarization’ manifests in the Indian bookselling field, with a large number of small brick-and-mortar bookstores on the one hand, occupying a relatively marginal place in the overall context of trade publishing and rendered vulnerable by a lack of organisation, visibility, and support; and, on the other hand, a small set of publishers and conglomerates commanding more power.

The idea of a polarised field is further reinforced when considering the one source of consistent support for brick-and-mortar bookstores within this series: independent publishers. The series includes eight articles focusing on independent publishers, all of whom explicitly stress the importance of physical bookstores as ‘supportive allies in keeping our work visible and in circulation’.Footnote ¹⁴² S. Anand, who runs the anti-caste publishing house Navayana, links his titles’ visibility in bookstores to his company’s higher ‘public profile’: ‘we reach the kind of bookstores that remain out of reach for Dalit publishers’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Yogesh Maitreya, who runs Dalit publishing house Panther’s Paw, explains that he has no formal ‘distribution mechanism’, relying on bookstores for his sales.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Frederick Noronha, owner of a niche publishing house in Goa, mentions co-publishing with local bookstores because of the ‘reduced risks’,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ and independent publishers Tara Books similarly mitigate risks by operating their own bookstore.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ While these, too, might be passing mentions, they nevertheless place importance in the varied roles the brick-and-mortar bookstore plays: as an ‘ally’ for non-mainstream publishing; as a source of visibility and social and symbolic capital; and as an added revenue stream for publishers, through ownership or co-publication. This polarised positioning of the field, and the interdependence between these relatively marginal agents, is an important theme emerging from this series; as will be discussed in the following sections, it is a significant factor which continues to influence the bookselling landscape in 2021 and beyond.

Thus far, these discussions of the brick-and-mortar bookstore might seem somewhat depressing, with threats and vulnerabilities at every turn. But the series also offers a silver lining, documenting evidence of a vital change that takes place over the course of the pandemic, with growing support for the brick-and-mortar bookstore from within the field. In their calls for support, booksellers in the series frequently draw attention to the lack of solidarity within the industry, wondering ‘if we can find a way for all of us – authors, publishers, distributors, booksellers and book lovers – to speak to each other, not just as individuals, but as a collective’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ One of the consequences of the pandemic, in fact, is precisely this; as publisher Priya Kapoor argues, ‘[a] welcome outcome of the lockdown is that it has sparked more conversations within the publishing industry. In the absence of a robust industry body to bring us together these interactions were infrequent and lacking’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The existence of the series itself exemplifies a long-overdue redressal of some of the gaps in communication and data within the industry, in its efforts to pull together voices from publishing professionals across the country. Within the series, writers frequently reference one another’s work, and several of the articles are framed as conversations or roundtables – five months after Radhika Timbadia’s plea for people in publishing to ‘find a way … to speak to each other’, she could participate in ‘a roundtable with professionals representing every segment of the value chain’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The series also highlights nascent efforts at organisation taking place across the country; Priya Kapoor mentions weekly meetings among publishing professionals, and a group of prominent booksellers advertise their new association for independent bookshops.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ These emerging displays of organising and solidarity are, in and of themselves, a notable development within the bookselling field.

It is equally important to note that these conversations, in the series and elsewhere, took place at a time in which Amazon’s monopoly had been briefly rendered meaningless as a result of restrictions on e-commerce; perhaps for the first time in years, members of the industry were forced to remember the value of the brick-and-mortar bookstore. Bookseller Priyanka Malhotra wryly reflects on this in her account of operating her bookstore in Delhi in 2020:

A true restoration of the ‘pre-online era’ would be impossible; the weakening of Amazon was temporary, and its discounting practices and warehousing infrastructure had already irrevocably altered the field. Still, the publishers’ renewed interest in the brick-and-mortar bookstore was a crucial development; and, Malhotra highlights, it extended beyond mere attention and into monetary support. While this moment might not have led to a return to the golden age of physical bookselling, it did lead to something new, which would come to define the new logic of the field in 2021 and beyond. The next section explores the ways in which brick-and-mortar bookstores seized this brief advantage by taking a set of actions that would affect their position – in terms of visibility, recognition, and solidarity – and thereby transform the bookselling landscape.

4.1 Beyond Brick-and-Mortar: Bookselling Online

In ‘Crisis Book Browsing: Restructuring the Retail Shelf Life of Books’, Kenna MacTavish explores the ways that independent bookstores in Australia responded to the pandemic as they shifted from being sites of browsing to ‘solely fulfilment warehouses’, arguing that social media became a ‘lifeline for independent bookstores’.Footnote ¹⁶³ In India, too, bookstores used the initial months of the pandemic to harness social media and digital platforms in new ways. As of March 2020, online bookselling was not a primary feature of many brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially stand-alones; nor did India have initiatives such as Bookshop.org.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Bookstores therefore faced the task of expanding their sales capacities to an entirely new sphere, innovating new practices, as well as educating customers on how to order books online.

Both Bahrisons and Champaca used Instagram as a primary platform to communicate these developments. Bahrisons chose to advertise through a series of detailed, text-based posts. On 2 May 2020, they announced that they would be opening to deliveries; over the next two days, two more posts on their feed explained the new ordering process. Customers had to place their orders by telephone; orders would then be delivered by the store, or customers could arrange for pick-up via a third-party delivery service.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ While orders were initially restricted to a limited number of neighbourhoods, a few days later, on 11 May, Bahrisons posted that they were open to deliveries throughout Delhi.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ A few weeks later, on 1 June, a new post announced: ‘The news you have been waiting for – we are now able to send books all over the country.’Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This time, the order instructions included an email address and a list of required details for the order; the caption also instructed customers, ‘Don’t DM [direct message] on Instagram!’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ These frequent, text-heavy posts are an awkward addition to a primarily visually appealing Instagram feed, suggesting a degree of unfamiliarity on the part of both bookseller and consumer; they reflect in real time the bookstore’s own processes of streamlining online sales systems as well as the need to educate customers on specific steps of coordinating order, payment, and delivery. For its part, Champaca avoided some of these challenges by making a more drastic decision: they used the period of total lockdown to create an online store, which was launched on 4 May 2020. The store was announced on Instagram in a post captioned inviting readers to ‘[b]uy a book from our specially-curated online store’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ For the first two weeks, Champaca only delivered within the city; two weeks later, on May 26, a post on their Instagram feed announced: ‘Delivering across India’, with a long caption explaining their vision for the webstore:

While Bahrisons encouraged readers to place orders via email or phone, Champaca’s new website offered a browse-and-buy experience that might appear more recognisable and seamless to consumers used to platforms like Amazon. In both cases, though, the bookstores continued to use social media to advertise their online offerings, as well as to communicate changes in delivery capacities as lockdown restrictions continued to fluctuate. Both stores also reminded customers of the newness of these structures: ‘we hope you will be patient … while we iron out all the small glitches’, read the caption to Champaca’s post launching deliveries across India;Footnote ¹⁷¹ and Bahrisons similarly asked their Instagram followers to understand that ‘at times we may get a little delayed … but will definately [sic] get back to you’.Footnote ¹⁷² These reminders of the human effort behind bookstores’ new online processes exemplifies what MacTavish calls ‘a post-digital book world rationale’,Footnote ¹⁷³ combining the familiar aspects of online sales with the equally familiar idiosyncrasies of brick-and-mortar browsing and buying experiences.

The brick-and-mortar experience is, of course, a key feature differentiating the bookstore from an e-retailer; and, as bookstores made the shift to online bookselling, they were also striving to transfer the experience of the physical bookstore to the online sphere. MacTavish introduces the term ‘crisis book browsing’ to describe ‘the rapid shift in book browsing practices as a result of ongoing global crises’, looking at Australian bookstores’ use of social media to recreate specific experiences of their physical stores.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In India, too, these shifts had begun to appear. On 20 May 2020, Bahrisons announced a new initiative on Instagram, ‘An afternoon with Bahrisons’, offering customers appointment-only video calls in which ‘a dedicated staff member’ would provide ‘uninterrupted browsing’ of the store’s extensive design and cooking sections.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Champaca, in turn, emphasised their in-store curation, which they aimed to make available online. Their website was organised to reflect this; as of 2020, for example, customers could browse through selections such as ‘Bangalore Authors’, ‘Caste’, ‘Zines’, and ‘Books About Books’, as well as collections spotlighting local independent presses such as Seagull, Zubaan, and Navayana.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In June 2020, Champaca extended its curation to a new format, announcing the Champaca Book Subscription, a themed monthly subscription box accompanied by an online book club.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In addition, throughout 2020, the store hosted a range of online events directly on the Instagram platform, as well as on Zoom, which retained elements of the in-store experience; the offerings in June, for example, included a cooking session with the chef from their instore café and an online version of their customary literary quiz.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In a variety of ways, then, both bookstores were working to extend facets of their brick-and-mortar experience to their online platforms.

The previous examples of bookstores’ use of social media and digital bookselling centre two primary experiences: allowing customers to virtually access the physical spaces of the bookstore, and transferring the selection and display practices of the physical store into its online proxy in a post-digital book world. This emphasis on curation, Ann Steiner argues, is one of the vital functions of the bookshop; as she observes, ‘the experience and sensation’ of a bookstore is as much a product as the books on sale.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Nor were Bahrisons and Champaca alone in this effort; bookstores across the country were focused on transferring the unique ‘experience and sensation’ of their brick-and-mortar environments to the online sphere, in varying ways. The Book Shop, Jor Bagh in New Delhi encouraged readers to order via Instagram, which they had long used as a platform to interact with customers, rather than setting up a website for sales.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ At the other end of the spectrum, Atta Galatta – a bookstore in Bengaluru specialising in Indian anglophone titles – chose not to sell online, in the belief that that ‘the core of our bookstore would [be] squelched by the unfeeling, all-seeing Internet’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Instead, they used social media solely for book-related conversations, offering recommendations and featuring interviews with authors and readers.Footnote ¹⁸² For the most part, though, bookstores responded to the pandemic by quickly transitioning to online bookselling, whether via Instagram, WhatsApp, or website – resulting in a bookselling field where, for the first time, readers who wanted to order a book from the comfort of their homes were presented with far more options than just Amazon or Flipkart.Footnote ¹⁸³ At the same time, in emphasising the unique experiences of their individual stores, these booksellers were effecting a second, even more paradigm-shifting transformation of the field.

4.2 ‘Thank You for Supporting Independent Bookstores!’: Activism and Identity

Even as bookstores made online bookselling possible, sales were not guaranteed. As MacTavish notes, bookstores using social media suffer an algorithmic disadvantage, with little control over visibility on third-party platforms; they must rely on community engagement (or paid promotions, which are likely unaffordable).Footnote ¹⁸⁴ For this reason, bookstores’ use of social media for ‘consciousness-raising’ is particularly important, as a means to build not just visibility, but a sense of community and a culture of support. In India, this consciousness-raising took the form of creating and communicating the identity of the independent bookstore.

Looking at both case studies, the ‘independent’ identity is notably quick to emerge in the early months of the pandemic. This is perhaps most interesting in the case of Bahrisons; despite its nearly seventy-year history, the bookstore rarely branded itself as an independent bookstore before 2020, and did not use the phrase in a single Instagram post throughout 2019.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Almost immediately after the lockdowns began, though, the term began to appear: on 5 May, a post thanked customers for their ‘continued trust, support and loyalty to independent bookstores like us’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Two days later, an even more succinct image on their feed simply read: ‘Thank you for supporting independent bookstores!’Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Bahrisons’ choice to explicitly, and repeatedly, brand themselves as an independent bookstore for the first time amidst this fresh wave of online activity suggests that there was new value in embracing this identity. One reason might be the boost in the visibility of the term, thanks to bookstores across the country participating in this new consciousness-raising. Nearly every post on Champaca’s Instagram feed across 2020 used the term ‘independent bookstore’ in either the image, caption or both; they also went a step further, explaining to readers the necessity and value of supporting independent bookstores. This messaging began very early on; on 19 March 2020, before formal lockdowns had even begun, Champaca posted a photo of their bookselling team on Instagram, announcing that they would be temporarily closing the store out of a concern for health and safety. The caption read, ‘we’re a newly opened independent bookstore, and closing our doors makes it difficult for us … to cover costs, rents, salaries’, asking customers to buy a gift voucher to support them during this time.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ On 14 April 2020, they reiterated: ‘By buying gift vouchers and spreading the word … you have strengthened our belief that books and independent bookstores are essential to the fabric of our lives.’Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Throughout the periods of lockdown across 2020 and 2021, posts on their Instagram asked readers to ‘Order online from your favourite independent bookstore’ and ‘Support your favourite independent bookstore’, frequently in combination with photographs of the team, reminding followers of the people behind the physical and virtual storefronts: as one caption read, ‘Champaca is what it is because of the hard work and unflagging enthusiasm that [our team] bring to the space, whether online or offline.’Footnote ¹⁹⁰ More explicitly than Bahrisons, Champaca also spoke of the independent bookstore as a collective identity defined in opposition to e-commerce sites: ‘[b]uying books from an independent bookstore, instead of Amazon, can make a world of difference for your local booksellers’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In this manifestation of social media usage, brick-and-mortar bookstores can be seen to adopt a range of strategies. On the one hand, the melding of online and offline elements extends the ‘post-digital book world rationale’.Footnote ¹⁹² At the same time, it also reflects a sustained and careful rhetorical positioning – after all, none of these social media posts acknowledge the fact that e-commerce giants like Amazon, too, were staffed by human beings whose livelihoods were affected by the pandemic. Instead, in aligning independent bookstores with local communities, and against a faceless, capitalist e-commerce site, these bookstores were actively constructing a powerful narrative of a collective identity.

This identity-building, particularly the explicit articulation of an opposition to Amazon, is a form of independent bookseller activism that most vividly echoes across brick-and-mortar bookstores’ online presences in 2020 and 2021. In August 2021, for example, Storyteller Bookstore, Kolkata, posted a thread on X explaining the challenges long faced by independent bookstores, such as authors’ and publishers’ tendency to publicise Amazon links for their new releases.Footnote ¹⁹³ The post was reposted by Bookworm Bookstore, Bengaluru, who added: ‘Support independent bookstores … We are all part of the community, your community’, and went on to name specific bookstores, including Champaca.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ In a separate thread, Bookworm listed the advantages that independent bookstores offered, observing that their role was to ‘be of service to the readers & authors as part of the community’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In this way, brick-and-mortar bookstores were creating, and sustaining, a conversation about their own identity. By amplifying one another’s voices, they were exhibiting a visible solidarity and sense of community, forging ties across a scattered, disconnected brick-and-mortar landscape – and the effects of this activism were almost immediately visible, in the form of more sustained support for the brick-and-mortar bookstore from others within the field.

4.3 ‘At a Bookstore Near You’: Support and Solidarity

As bookstores’ independent bookseller activism grew more visible and coordinated, publishers began to join the conversation, using their own digital platforms to express support. Naturally, this began in the period in which e-commerce sites could not sell books. As early as April 2020, HarperCollins India posed a thread on X, listing bookstores that were open for delivery.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Penguin India posted a similar thread in May 2020, although this list was restricted to bookstores in Delhi-NCR.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ These instances are more utilitarian, as publishers were forced to rely on bookstores as their only platform for sales. However, other efforts by publishers were more long-lasting. For example, from May 2020 onwards, HarperCollins India began to advertise its new releases on X with the phrase ‘available online or at a bookstore near you’; while this is standard practice in other markets, prior to 2020, announcements were only accompanied by an e-commerce link, with no mention of a physical bookstore.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ This is, admittedly, still a fairly cosmetic change – the clickable link on each post still leads to Amazon – but indicates a rhetorical reprioritisation on the part of publishers. As well, these publishers’ accounts had far more followers and greater visibility than those of independent bookstores; their mentions of the brick-and-mortar bookstores, however minor, were essential in communicating their existence and importance to a wider audience.

Beyond support for physical bookstores in general, publishers also began to engage more prominently with the ‘independent’ identity. In late April 2020, HarperCollins India launched a video series on YouTube, ‘ShopTalk’, a ‘series with indie bookstores’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The first episode, featuring Bahrisons, is titled ‘Shop Around the Corner’ – a reference that recalls the independent bookstore in the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, perhaps the most well-known depiction of the indie-versus-chain conflict in popular culture. The reference might have been unintentional, but it is fitting, as Bahrisons and other brick-and-mortar bookstores used the months following the pandemic to engage in their own form of independent bookseller activism. And although the results were not immediate, by the time the pandemic restrictions had eased, the bookselling field had dramatically transformed – with the brick-and-mortar bookstore experiencing, not a death, but a long-awaited renaissance.

5.1 The Post-Pandemic Bookselling Landscape

As pandemic restrictions eased and the world entered its ‘new normal’, the bookselling landscape of 2021 looked very different than it had even two years ago. The conversations built around supporting independent bookstores could not mitigate all the challenges bookstores faced, and closures were inevitable, including for several of the bookshops featured in ‘Publishing and the Pandemic’. In Hyderabad, Walden – once a thriving chain in the city, which in its heyday had boasted popcorn machines and make-your-own-T-shirt counters – closed their last remaining outlet in October 2020; Mohan’s Bookshop in Kolkata shut in May 2021.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Beyond this, of course, are the bookstores whose existence was not recorded in this series or elsewhere. Nevertheless, even as lockdowns and social distancing continued through to early 2022, it seemed that more bookstores were opening doors, rather than closing them. Both bookstores focused on in my case studies opened new outlets: Bahrisons launched a new store in New Delhi in October 2020, while lockdowns were still in place, and in the next two years they expanded beyond Delhi-NCR for the first time, with a store in Chandigarh in April 2022, followed by one in Kolkata in 2023.Footnote ²⁰¹ Champaca, too, opened a new branch in Goa in October 2022.Footnote ²⁰² For both bookstores, this was a notable development: the former an established, nearly seventy-year-old institution, expanding to other states for the first time; and the latter a brand-new store, capable of growth within three years of operation. Elsewhere, too, new beginnings abounded: Full Circle addressed the challenge of higher rent by moving to a new location in 2020; Pagdandi Bookstore Café in Pune opened a new branch in 2022; and Walking Bookfairs opened doors in Cuttack in 2023.Footnote ²⁰³ Other stores saw a more literal rebirth: The Book Shop, an iconic Delhi bookstore, announced its closure in October 2023, but swiftly rebranded as The Bookshop Inc., with ‘a new partnership, a new location, a new adventure’.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Stand-alone stores were not the only ones expanding; in August 2023, STORY, a Kolkata chain, relocated to ‘a sprawling 4,000 sq feet bookstore’, and opened a second outlet the following month.Footnote ²⁰⁵ And Crossword, India’s largest chain, opened its one hundredth branch in the country in 2023.Footnote ²⁰⁶ For the brick-and-mortar bookstore, whether independents or chains, it seemed that the post-pandemic environment offered new possibilities for expansion and growth.

The visibility of these bookstores in online spaces might have helped them survive and expand their reach. Even more interesting, though, is the emergence of brand-new bookstores across the country, which were able to benefit from this wave of independent bookseller activism. In Kohima in northeast India, an independent bookstore and café called The Common Room opened in late 2020.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Hyderabad lost an iconic bookstore in 2020, but in 2022 Luna, a ‘cosy and serene independent bookstore’, opened its doors.Footnote ²⁰⁸ The same year, The White Owl Book Lounge opened in Nagaland in northeast India, promising to ‘transcend the conventional boundaries of a mere bookshop’, with a ‘carefully curated selection’ for every reader.Footnote ²⁰⁹ As recently as January 2023, a ‘bistro and bookstore’, Casa Kundera, was set up in Dehradun in north India.Footnote ²¹⁰ Amidst this flurry of growth, existing businesses were even choosing to pivot to bookselling. Kunzum Travel Café, a well-known café in Delhi, announced an ambitious rebrand on its website in early 2022:

A set of infographics explains the new concept: ‘It’s a chain of bookshops! It’s a café! It’s a community’, describing their reimagined space as a ‘(bricks & mortar) place where authors, readers, editors, designers, publishers … come together’.Footnote ²¹² Kunzum debuted its new identity by opening five stores across the city over two months – including one outlet, called Penguin@Kunzum, described as ‘the world’s only exclusive store showcasing the best of the world’s biggest publisher!’Footnote ²¹³ Kunzum’s reinvention perhaps best illustrates the transformation that has taken place in the field: with an established business choosing to pivot to bookselling on such a large scale; the ‘independent’ rhetoric of curation, community, and physical space running throughout its mission statement; and the clear industry support evidenced by the involvement of a ‘big five’ publisher, Penguin Random House India.

This spate of new openings and expansion – a phenomenon which had not been seen in India since the ‘golden age’ of the chain nearly two decades ago – does have its parallels in other post-pandemic book markets. In the United States, 300 new independent bookstores opened between 2020 and 2022, ‘in a surprising and welcome revival’.Footnote ²¹⁴ The American chain, too, seems to be thriving, with Barnes & Noble poised to open fifty new outlets in 2024.Footnote ²¹⁵ The UK also saw expansion in brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2023, although this was accompanied by more closures of independent bookstores.Footnote ²¹⁶ As well, outside of the major anglophone markets, different book markets saw varying, often surprising changes in the wake of the pandemic. In Argentina, Buenos Aires, known for its rich bookselling landscape, saw bookstores ‘multiplying and thriving’ through the pandemic, despite economic instability – to the point that booksellers have begun to worry about an ‘oversaturation’ of the market.Footnote ²¹⁷ At the other end of the spectrum, both Brazil – where leading bookstore chains had already suffered before 2020 – and South Africa saw the pandemic push more readers away from bookstores, towards digital reading and e-commerce sites such as Amazon.Footnote ²¹⁸ And in the Philippines, the expansion of online sales took a slightly different route, as publishers began to bypass bookstores entirely, and deal directly with customers.Footnote ²¹⁹ These different developments are testament to the unique infrastructural, economic, and cultural contexts of each book market; while some of the factors prompting growth in countries such as the United States and the UK doubtless apply in the Indian context – such as falling rents in the wake of the pandemic – others, most notably governmental support for physical bookstores, did not occur in the Indian context.Footnote ²²⁰ India has seen the beginning of some forms of organisation, such as the Independent Bookshops Association of India (IBAI), although this is still in early stages, and as of August 2024 only involves sixteen bookstores as members.Footnote ²²¹ Nevertheless, it seems clear that, as a collective, the brick-and-mortar bookstore no longer faces the same degree of marginalisation and vulnerability that were so evident over the last decade. As a more visible, robust network, this also means that brick-and-mortar bookstores can exert more influence on the wider context of trade publishing.

5.2 Bibliodiversity and the Bookstore

In 2015, feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia remarked upon one of the consequences of the ‘death of the bookstore’, worrying that ‘[b]ibliodiversity is in danger’.Footnote ²²² ‘Bibliodiversity’ – a term created by Chilean independent publishers, and popularised by Susan Hawthorne – emphasises the role of independent publishers in ‘contribut[ing] to a thriving life of culture’.Footnote ²²³ Butalia used the word more generally, speaking of the effect of Amazon’s power in boosting sales of bestsellers, to the detriment of midlist or unknown titles – another kind of flattening of the range of voices that are given space and publicity.Footnote ²²⁴ In both senses, however, the revival of the bookstore, and specifically of the independent bookstore, is a positive sign for bibliodiversity in contemporary Indian publishing.

As discussed earlier, independent presses in the country have long been reliant on bookstores, rather than online platforms, for their survival. A more diverse landscape of independent bookstores, therefore, has only increased the possibility for visibility and promotion of a wider range of titles. Part of this is simply due to the fact that, in a newly populated landscape, and amidst the wave of independent bookseller activism, brick-and-mortar bookstores must increasingly stress the curatorial value of their individual selections in order to stand out in the crowd. Champaca’s website, for example, allows customers to browse individual independent publishers, including a range of Indian presses such as Kokaachi, Reliable Copy, and Adivaani.Footnote ²²⁵ Luna Books in Hyderabad does not offer a webstore, but states on its website that their team is ‘mindful of ensuring diversity – in vintage, genre … and authorship’ in its selection of books.Footnote ²²⁶ As well, recent years have seen bookstores leverage their new visibility by supporting independent publishers and local writers in other ways; in 2021, for example, Scroll reported that Pagdandi, Pune, was ‘in preliminary talks with a few indie publishers to increase the print runs of certain books based on orders’.Footnote ²²⁷ Other efforts are on an even larger scale, involving multiple stakeholders: in Nagaland, the White Owl bookstore launched The White Owl Literature Festival and Book Fair in February 2024 in collaboration with Penguin Random House and Cambridge University Press, aiming to celebrate ‘the Northeast’s history, culture and geography’.Footnote ²²⁸ In their curation and championing of local voices and independent presses, bookstores can promote bibliodiversity in a variety of ways.

A diversity of titles is important, but in a country with such a historically fragmented, uneven bookselling landscape, it is perhaps equally important to cultivate a readership; central to the idea of bibliodiversity is the idea of a culture or ecosystem that is as dependent on consumers as it is on producers. As accounts across ‘Publishes and the Pandemic’ highlighted, in several parts of the country, visiting a physical bookstore was a rarity even as recently as 2020; and it is important to acknowledge the ways in which the brick-and-mortar bookstore, and particularly the independent bookstore, can appear to be an intimidating, elitist, or exclusive space – or at the very least an unfamiliar one. I suggest that another way in which the revival of brick-and-mortar bookselling can contributed to greater bibliodiversity is through encouraging reading and book-buying cultures. In recent years, brick-and-mortar bookstores have taken steps to make themselves more accessible to a wider readership by reimagining the space and function of the bookstore. Between late 2023 and early 2024, for example, multiple bookstores, including Dogears, Goa; Pagdandi, Pune; and Kunzum, Delhi, set up book clubs, with readers free to bring their own books rather than making purchases.Footnote ²²⁹ Several bookstores, such as Champaca, Kunzum, The White Owl, and The Common Room also double as lending libraries, thus making at least part of their collections available to a wider readership who might not be able to afford new books at full price.Footnote ²³⁰

At the same time, as a result of the independent bookseller activism across the pandemic, these efforts have been matched by a greater awareness among consumers, which also serves to diversify readership and reading cultures. Laura Miller suggests that conscious consumerism is a key factor in supporting independent bookstores, ‘provid[ing] a means to exercise influence in economic processes that generally appear beyond the control of ordinary people’.Footnote ²³¹ The extreme price-sensitivity of the Indian market makes conscious consumer choices a complex subject; nevertheless, the rhetoric of ethical consumption and supporting local bookstores has noticeably increased since 2020, perhaps supported by the rising education levels and digital access of India’s growing young population.Footnote ²³² The Reddit community ‘Indianbooks’, for example, has seen multiple discussions between 2020 and 2022 asking for recommendations of ‘ethical’ places to buy books in India.Footnote ²³³ And, in the absence of a database of bookstores in the country, readers have stepped in to fill in these gaps: in June 2022, blogger Peter Griffin posted a crowd-sourced map, ‘Indie bookshops in India’, inspired by a conversation with bookseller (and IBAI founder) Leonard Fernandes.Footnote ²³⁴ Users were asked to contribute by adding trade bookstores to the map; as of August 2024, the map includes 132 bookstores.Footnote ²³⁵ And, while gauging the actual impact of these shifts in consumer behaviour is notoriously difficult, sales data has been promising. In 2023, Nielsen’s mid-year update on international markets reported growth in India, citing ‘consumers … embracing a return to bricks-and-mortar stores’.Footnote ²³⁶ This growth has continued through 2024, with India displaying the highest growth amongst sixteen markets surveyed.Footnote ²³⁷

In this way, the post-pandemic bookselling landscape is bibliodiverse in the most multifaceted sense of the word, with brick-and-mortar bookstores forming a vital part of an ecosystem, providing a set of new, varied spaces in which readers can access a range of books by local and independent authors, interact, and form community. In turn, this might suggest the possibility of a change in the polarisation of the field, with growing recognition for both the brick-and-mortar bookstore and the independent press, which were previously marginalised and relatively powerless. However, while the bookstore (and independent presses) might be flourishing in the contemporary field, their revival remains inextricably linked to the priorities and decisions of other bigger, and more influential, players in the field.

5.3 Conglomerate and Corporate Priorities: The End of the Age of Amazon?

As the brick-and-mortar bookstore transformed from a marginal, vulnerable entity to a growing, thriving space, it did not do so in a vacuum; the positions and priorities of other individuals and organisations in the field were also affected by the pandemic in important ways, impacting the wider industry. In this case, a key element of the new logic of the field comes from exploring the changing priorities of conglomerate publishers, and their relationship to another corporate giant: Amazon. Alongside their own activism, the revival of the brick-and-mortar bookstore is equally afforded by conglomerate publishers’ decision to reinvest value in bookstores – which, in turn, might be a consequence of their own changing relationship with Amazon.

To begin with, it is worth briefly outlining how conglomerate publishing functions in the Indian context. While the anglophone trade market is minuscule, it is also overcrowded, with the presence of all the ‘big five’ publishers, each of which run local publishing programmes alongside importing titles from the United States and the UK. Several of these publishers also function as distributors for smaller international independents; thus, for example, Penguin Random House India distributes books from Fitzcarraldo Editions and Sourcebooks, and HarperCollins India is the distributor for Oneworld and Harvard University Press, among others.Footnote ²³⁸ This means that, within a relatively small market sector, conglomerate publishers are responsible for three separate verticals: local publishing (with implications for the firms’ local revenue targets), imports (with implications for the parent companies’ revenue targets), and distributed titles (with implications for the companies’ relationships with international players.) Conglomerate publishers’ historic reliance on Amazon is perhaps understandable given the range of titles and the weak network of physical bookstores in the pre-pandemic years – while Amazon might not necessarily guarantee high visibility, it could at least promise availability across extensive front- and backlists.

Though the pandemic could not permanently alter Amazon’s reach, across 2021 and 2022, the company made substantial changes to its operations, with repercussions for the publishing industry. This had a legal basis: during this time, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) opened investigations into Cloudtail. Cloudtail was a leading seller on Amazon India, with a characteristically complex ownership: it was run by Prione Business Services, itself a joint venture between Catamaran – an investment firm owned by prominent businessman Narayana Murthy (with a 76% stake) – and Amazon India, which owned the remaining 24%.Footnote ²³⁹ The ownership split was necessitated by laws preventing overseas companies ‘from running an online retailer that holds inventory’ – hence Amazon India’s ‘marketplace’ model – but retailers complained that Cloudtail received preferential treatment on the platform, and was able to offer higher discounts.Footnote ²⁴⁰ In 2022, the joint venture was dissolved, and Amazon took over complete ownership; as a result, Cloudtail ‘ceased its business-to-consumer operations’.Footnote ²⁴¹ This was a boon to most of the retail sector, as Cloudtail had monopolised the online marketplace; but Cloudtail was also the seller favoured by most of the ‘big five’ publishers, and its loss meant that the logistical convenience and deep discounting of Amazon no longer held the same weight.Footnote ²⁴² Instead, a return to several smaller marketplace sellers meant that the online bookselling space had become as fragmented as the physical one. Beyond this, as Amazon neared its tenth anniversary in the country, the company had begun to publicly declare its vision for the future – a vision that no longer prioritised bookselling. In 2023, Amazon announced a ‘game plan’ for India focusing on more investment in fashion, online groceries, and business-to-business solutions, with no mention of books.Footnote ²⁴³ And, despite their promises of growth, in 2023 Amazon declined to mention India in its first-quarter ‘earnings call’ for the first time since 2014, causing speculation about changing priorities in the region.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Ten years after Amazon India had grown to be the near-monopoly seller for books, then, a combination of legal restrictions and its own business priorities might make it appear less valuable to publishers.

Moreover, in 2022, Amazon India made a decision which dramatically affected Indian trade publishing – and, perhaps inadvertently, strengthened its bonds. On 1 February 2022, Amazon abruptly announced the closure of Westland, the publishing company it had acquired in 2016; literary translator and book critic Arunava Sinha describes the trade’s response as ‘a concerted wail of despair across the English language publishing industry in general’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ The announcement was so sudden that books would have to be pulled off the shelves within the month; more bafflingly, it was not accompanied by any explanation, leaving the industry reeling. Westland was a well-respected, successful publisher, with ‘a sizeable combination of sales volumes and cultural cache [sic]’;Footnote ²⁴⁶ more to the point, Westland’s legacy spanned a long history from its earliest days as a distributor, and the company had acquired ‘tremendous goodwill across the publishing ecosystem’ over the years.Footnote ²⁴⁷ The decision affected individuals and organisations across the field: experienced publishers and editors, bestselling authors, distributors, booksellers, and readers. Crucially, as the trade was left shaken by Amazon’s decision, brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country stepped in to offer support. The Times of India reported that bookstores in Bengaluru offered higher discounts, reserved copies for customers, and even arranged for international shipping of Westland titles, and many booksellers emphasised Westland’s iconic place in Indian publishing and book retail.Footnote ²⁴⁸ In fact, booksellers did not hesitate to take this opportunity to explicitly engage in independent bookseller activism. In an extended caption on Instagram, Champaca remarked of the decision:

Similarly, bookseller Ravi Menezes invoked the power of the independent, suggesting that ‘[i]f Westland Books had remained independent, it might still have been around’, and urging readers to ‘[p]atronise local bookstores or we all might go the Westland Books way’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Luckily, Westland’s closure had a happy ending; its publishing team set up an imprint under the same name with online platform Pratilipi in April 2022, and eventually republished many of its books under the new venture.Footnote ²⁵¹ Nevertheless, the incident had undeniably altered ties within the industry; with Amazon’s exit from Westland, their strongest link to the publishing field had disappeared, and the abruptness of their decision was an indication that while Amazon was seen by publishers as essential, the feeling was not mutual. At the same time, publishers were reminded of a set of players within the industry who could be relied on for support – the brick-and-mortar bookstore.

In offering this support, the brick-and-mortar bookstore was also better poised, post-pandemic, to meet publishers’ needs. Thanks to their efforts across 2020 and 2021, many of these stores now had vibrant online presences and stronger delivery systems; The Book Shop, for example, proudly advertised on social media that they had delivered to every state in the country over the course of the pandemic.Footnote ²⁵² Thus, conglomerate publishers could rely on bookstores, for the first time, to provide some of the opportunities previously restricted to Amazon, such as the online pre-order. Bookstore pre-orders were demonstrably popular in post-pandemic years: in May 2023, Bookworm offered pre-orders of Beyond the Story, the biography of K-pop group BTS, and announced that all copies were reserved within two days.Footnote ²⁵³ Brick-and-mortar bookstores had always offered in-person events and author signings, but with more bookstores across the country – and more visibility for these bookstores – these advantages were even more apparent. For all these reasons, the post-pandemic logic of the field has seen conglomerate publishers turning – or returning – to the brick-and-mortar bookstore, and increasingly adopting the rhetoric of independent bookseller activism in urging readers to support their local bookstores. From 2021 onwards, Hachette India’s FAQ page has listed the independent bookstores where their titles are available.Footnote ²⁵⁴ The reprioritisation extends beyond rhetoric to on-the-ground support; following their exclusive bookstore with Kunzum, Penguin Random House India announced a similar setup with The White Owl, Nagaland, in February 2024.Footnote ²⁵⁵ This is, perhaps, the beginning of new trend in collaboration between publishers and bookstores; it also underscores their ultimate interdependence in the wider context of trade publishing.

This complex relationship between bookstores’ activism, Amazon’s strategic decisions, and publishers’ actions is a reminder that the revival of the brick-and-mortar bookstore is not the result of altruism, nor a reflection of some ‘special’ value inherent to books; rather, it is the result of a combination of rhetorical positioning, corporate priorities, and profit motives. The renewed status of the brick-and-mortar bookstore is both a result of bookstores’ intentional, sustained activism post-pandemic and the decisions of corporate publishers, whose own needs – greater shelf-space for a wider selection of titles – might be better served, at least in the immediate term, by the brick-and-mortar bookstore. Nevertheless, it remains evident that the combination of these factors has dramatically transformed the contemporary landscape of brick-and-mortar bookselling from a space of fragmentation, uncertainty, and marginalisation to one of possibility, expansion, and renewed bibliodiversity.