This year is the Assam government’s ‘Year of Reading’. This declaration of intent came after the Guwahati Book Fair in January totted up ₹7 crore sales. It’s a good slogan that ignores the fact that every year in India for nearly two decades has been a ‘year of reading’, with an exploding readership across the linguistic spectrum.
But Assam itself has no creditable publishing industry. The book fair had 15 publishers from Kolkata, 16 from New Delhi, and one from Gurugram—which means that the publishing industry has its roots elsewhere, mostly in the metropolises. India’s publishing ecosystem is cartelised.
This is not to diss Assam: it had a modest 118 stalls and a footfall of 5.5 lakh. This year, the Kolkata Book Fair—the oldest in India and the second-largest in the world—had estimated sales of ₹27 crore from 1,057 stalls and a footfall of 29 lakh. The sales numbers from the intricately organised World Book Fair in New Delhi, which had 20 lakh visitors in more than 2,000 stalls, are not yet out, but as always, they are probably somewhat lower than frenetic Kolkata’s.
These are mega book fairs, and it isn’t entirely evenhanded to compare them with those in smaller cities. Nonetheless, extravagant averments abound, such as the Pune Book Festival’s claim that 10 lakh visitors bought 25 lakh books worth ₹40 crore. Meanwhile, others are trying to commercialise themselves by taking the boxable route. The showcase at Jorhat, Guwahati and Sambalpur is on randomised books sold in cardboard crates of various denominations.
This makes for a commercial spread, from the conventional to the hyped to the questionably unorthodox. According to bibliophiles, discussions on books should be centred on themes, narrative lines, coherence, and decipherability, not on FMCG sales. However, publishing today is a capitalist-consumerist meta-enterprise—with fiction sales dominated by books with blingy, gilt-embossed covers—and every book fest must define itself in muscular marketing.
Time was, not long ago, when book fairs ran on discounts—not the 10 percent that every publisher hands out as condescending benediction today, but up to 70 percent of the cover price, depending on the thematic value of the book, its availability or rarity, its vintage, and its condition. Secondhand sellers bought books from space-constrained publishers and distributors by weight or volume—their covers, until a couple of decades ago, defaced or excised to hide their provenance—and sold them individually for a profit that all added up to being far less impositional on the pockets than new books.
For book lovers with lean wallets—probably 90 percent of them—these secondhand sellers at book fairs were lifesavers. Books have always been hard on savings, although not many readers would consider them discretionary expenditure. While they didn’t impact the presence of legacy publishers, secondhand booksellers were an anchor of book fairs. Publishers were once just that: they edited and printed stuff that independent marketing set-ups then distributed. At book fairs, publishers would sell their books directly to readers, discounted significantly by cutting out the distributor’s substantial margin.
But that changed when publishers also became distributors, not only of their own books but of other niche or boutique publishers and titles by foreign publishers. However, when publishers became distributors—or distributors became publishers, as Jaico, which started as a distributor in 1946 and became “India’s first publisher of paperback books in the English language” in 1955—they pretty much ended their tempting-discount regime. According to India’s Association of Publishers, there were 9,037 publishers in the country in 2019. The vast majority of them are small-time, dependent upon others for distribution. The major publishers, however, are their own distributors, and none of them has any incentive to offer more than the baseline 10 percent discount at book fairs.
This is why you see book-buyers with mobile phones at the ready with the Amazon app open. At all publishers’ stalls, they cross-check prices with Amazon—and, in nearly every single instance, Amazon beats the publishers’ pricing by up to 30 percent. The book lovers check out the books at the kitab melas and order from Amazon. Why wouldn’t they? India was (and remains) a price-sensitive market for books, where impulsive purchases continue to depend upon discounts on MRP.
The Kolkata Book Fair 2025 lacked secondhand booksellers. Whether it was a whimsical organisational exclusion or a studied commercial one, it led to a drop in the quantum—if not necessarily the value—of books sold. The Delhi Book Fair had a fair share of seconds, but they were allotted unappealing locations, and most browsers were prodded by strategic signage to the high-priced legacy publishers’ stalls.
Indian legacy publishing is at a crossroads. It can either drop its appallingly high book prices or face the inevitable armageddon. Although, according to Milind Sudhakar Marathe, chairman of the National Book Trust, “the publication market is growing at an 18 percent rate”, this figure is uncheckable. It could be less, and no one would know, for, as business journalist Debashish Mukherji wrote in ‘Indian Publishing: An Area of Darkness’, “seek the basis or source of these figures and it quickly emerges they are all conjectures”.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist