Often in book stores and literary fairs, you will find at least one person slyly taking out a mobile phone and clicking pictures of book titles she would go home and buy online.
Some others just compare prices with online bookstores and leave the book shop empty handed. Little wonder then that decades-old places like Fact and Fiction in New Delhi, small ones loaded with a lot of love for the books they sell, close down one morning when it’s all too much to take.
Reminds you of the sequence in the Hollywood flick You’ve Got Mail when Meg Ryan’s cosy little bookstore has to shut down after her loyal customers choose the new big place Tom Hanks opens across the road.
But this is not the same story. The competition here is not a giant bookstore across the street, but the all too powerful digital age, that’s come to the world of books with its online stores and its eBook readers.
The question of writing in the digital age rises once more as Kerala gets ready for a major literary festival. The sixth edition of Kovalam Literary Festival is happening in Thiruvananthapuram this Saturday – October 10 – and writers, who have tasted success in the times of Kindle and Amazon, talk about their angst, their thoughts, their joys.
Akshaya Mukul who has written the Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India will be in Thiruvananthapuram for the festival, and talk about the origin and growth of the Hindu extreme right in India.
Writing in the digital age, he says, has helped him with the book. He had to do a lot of research, go through archives that were available online, which would have been difficult to get, a few years ago.
“Increasing digitisation also increases democratisation of knowledge. The archives and libraries of old books and manuscripts made available to people through internet, really help.”
As for eBooks, he hears it is not as big as it’s being made of. “There is still an interesting space for good old traditional books, and I for one, still prefer those. They won’t die any time soon.”
Khyrunnisa A, the successful author of the Butterfingers series, is most sorry about the fate of book shops and small libraries. “We must remember that book stores are not just commercial establishments, they play a cultural role in every society. When profit-driven online vendors kill them, it’s a huge loss to everyone.”
Though online purchase is largely an urban phenomenon, bookshops in small towns and villages are also affected by the competition and their disappearance is a blow to readers there, she says. “As a writer I’m naturally concerned that books don’t reach these readers.”
But while on the one hand she’s unhappy about bookshops closing, she’s grateful that Kindle and online book stores make books easily available to people who can’t be bothered or are too busy to browse in bookshops.
“A few clicks and hey presto, you have them!” A huge concern is what the digital age has done to reading. “The electronic age has made visual content very appealing and it’s unfortunate that more people are looking at pictures than reading books. But on the brighter side, there appears to be more of everything in the digital age; I hope there will be more readers for my books.”
Somewhere in central India, says writer Anees Salim, there exists (‘I hope it still exists’) a bookstore that should never go out of business. “I chanced upon this tiny, old shop about 15 years ago on one of my long journeys across India. It had the narrowest aisles I had ever come across in a store, and books were everywhere: on shelves and windowsills, under the cash counter and chairs… just about everywhere. A store that filled to the brim with books, and smelled of marigold because many pictures on the walls were luxuriously garlanded.”
He is an ardent lover and supporter of bookstores, especially the ones that are small and humble, and run by people who are bookworms.
“In my early years of writing, bookstores served more like therapy centres for me. Every time I got a rejection mail I invariably went to a bookstore to lament in private. I went from aisle to aisle and read the opening paragraphs of hundreds of books until I was inspired enough to write again,” says the man whose books have all become bestsellers once Harper Collins put out his first.
He believes people still go to bookstores to browse, maybe they just buy it online for the discounts. “I hope they still buy books from physical stores, at least from the one that smelled of marigold.”
