COURTESY HT SEPT 14

Copies sit on shelves as students crack e-books
Manoj Sharma

letters@hindustantimes.com

New Delhi : For six decades, Rajiv Gupta’s family has been selling school and college textbooks from their shop in Delhi’s Nai Sarak, one of the country’s biggest textbook markets. The shop, which saw a never-ending stream of students before the onset of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic, hardly receives any customers these days. “These days, only a few parents come to buy books for their children,” says Gupta.

The continued closure of educational institutions due to the pandemic has dealt a blow to the textbook industry, with booksellers and publishers experiencing an unprecedented decline in their business after decades of robust growth.

According to a 2015 report by Nielsen, the books market was likely to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 19.6%.

But the story has taken a grim turn and publishers are sitting on massive unsold stocks. “Our sales have plummeted 50% this academic session,” says Ashwani Goyal, managing director, Goyal Publishers, one of the country’s largest publishers of language learning books.

Experts say this decline in sales is partly due to the fact that many private schools are now recommending digital books. “A lot of private schools that put the list of books on websites recommended digital books in case the children were unable to buy physical copies,” said Bharat Arora of Action Committee of Unaided Recognized Private Schools, an association of private schools in Delhi.

What is clear is that the changing industry of print textbooks in the post-Covid world means that publishers will have to reinvent themselves.