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The President of India has written a book. As things stand, it will not be available at a bookstore near you.
Pranab Mukherjee’s book The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, which is set to release on December 11, will be available only on Amazon.in and remain exclusive to the online platform till December 31. Published by Rupa, the book is priced at Rs 545 and is the first of a three-part series.
Kapish Mehra, the managing director of Rupa, confirmed that The Dramatic Decade would only be available on Amazon.in from December 11 to 31 and in bookstores thereafter.
When a countrywide bookstore chain sent an order for a 1,000 copies of The Dramatic Decade to Rupa last week, Mehra reportedly told the sales team that he wouldn’t be able to send the book before January 1.
Bookstore owners across the country, including in Calcutta, have reacted with shock and anger at Rupa’s attempt to favour an online player at a time when brick-and-mortar stores are suffering from the rise in web commerce and their discounts.
After the Rupa-Amazon deal came to light, many bookstore owners have come together and are mulling a ban on all Rupa titles in their stores to protest the “unfair trade practice” and “send a strong message to publishers”.
Heads of a number of bookstores said that if they were denied the President’s book for the first 20 days, they might stop stocking other Rupa titles as well, as a mark of protest “because Rupa is supporting monopolistic practices”.
In Calcutta, Sidharth Pansari of Story on Elgin Road said, “This is a very unfortunate and negative step by the publisher. It should have been the other way round, the book should have come to stores first and then gone online. Bookstores depend on big and important books like The Dramatic Decade to drive footfall,” he pointed out.
Gautam Jatia, the CEO of Starmark, which has outlets in Calcutta and Chennai, said such a deal not only hits bookstores hard but also makes publishers dependent on online retailers in the long run.
“This is a very short-sighted measure. A publisher gets good money on one deal but once the bookstore business shrinks, publishers will become vulnerable and have to agree to terms dictated by online retailers,” he said.
Citing the recent instance where major publishing house Hachette took Amazon to court in the US over pricing and promotions, Jatia said he was shocked that the opposite was happening in India. “Bookstores run after inventories but for an online retailer that sells everything from clothes to laptops to cosmetics, books are not a priority.”
Pansari added that this move would set a dangerous precedent and if it became the norm, bookstore owners would have to either shut shop or sell other things. “The idea of having a bookstore is that it will give you the best and the latest books. If I can’t give you that, why will you come to my store?” he rued.
According to industry insiders, this deal is part of a turf war currently being waged between the home-grown Flipkart and the international giant Amazon. Bookstore owners say both are offering big discounts on books by first buying in bulk from publishers and secondly by paying from their own pocket. But once they capture the market, they will control all pricing, promotions and product placements on their websites, bookstore owners warn.
“These websites are not interested in selling books, they want to build customer bases. Once they have the customers, they will do nothing to sell books,” said Kinjal Shah, the CEO of Crossword, which runs 96 bookstores across 33 Indian cities. “But a bookstore is crucial for browsing, visibility of books and for discovering new authors,” he argued.
Bookstore owners say they had in fact hoped publishers would rally behind them. “An iPhone 6 sells for Rs 53,000 on Amazon, which is the full price, because Apple chose to protect its on-ground distributors. But for a Rs 545 book, there’s a 25 per cent discount online and no stocks for bookstores for the first 20 days. This is very sad,” said a bookseller in Calcutta.
When asked why the President’s book was being provided just to Amazon, Rupa’s Kapish Mehra said: “I would not like to comment on this. The President’s book is beyond everything. I think we should not say anything and give it the respect it deserves.”
When asked if the decision to give the exclusive rights to Amazon was the President’s or the publisher’s, Mehra said again: “I would not like to say anything.”
Pansari of Story said that it was ironical that a book written by the President of India will not be available to everyone initially. “How can you force people to buy their President’s book only online for the first 20 days?” he wondered. Shah of Crossword echoed his sentiments. “It’s a shame for our country if a book by our President is not available in bookstores, he said.
Bookstore owners are now hoping that the President will take note of this “unfair trade practice” and make the book available across all platforms from the launch date itself.