BOOK SELLERS IN TRIPLICANE

Triplicane is known as one of the hotspots for books in Chennai the other areas being Mount Road, Lily Pond Complex (the erstwhile Moore Market) and Parry's. We can see three major categories of booksellers in Triplicane - the proper bookstores, the organised second hand bookstores and the pavement booksellers.  While the first and the third variety have proliferated, the second variety is dying a slow death.

Bookstores at Triplicane do not deal specifically with any particular subject.  Here it is not about being a specialist place catering just to engineering or computer or management students.  Says the proprietor of Triplicane Book House, one of the early entrants in the business, "It is not that we concentrate on all the subjects, but we try to have as much variety as we can at the same time we do not stock up heavily on particular subjects like Engineering or computers just because a lot of students want them".

While mostly it is college students who come and buy, a few school students from nearby schools who stay in the surrounding area also make purchases. And where do these bookstores source their books from?  Since the majority of the publishing companies are in the north, 95% of the books are sourced from Mumbai or Delhi, where all the major publishers are located.  There are only four or five major publishers in Chennai.

Almost all bookstores rely on their experience to decide on how much to stock of a particular book.  Says one bookstore owner, "based on our many years of experience, we know what sells and what doesn't.  But our calculations do not work always.  For example, we may have about 100 enquiries for one book, but may end up selling maybe even less than 10 units.  The enquiries could have been duplicated, in the sense that the parent of the student, as well as the student may have made enquiries for buying just one book.  We try to anticipate demand and also try our best to give what the students need".

There were conflicting versions however over what happened to unsold books.  While a majority of the shop keepers said that publishers take back what is unsold and that they suffer no loss on that count, one shopkeeper however said that stocking books was a major risk as he had to bear the loss in case of unsold books.

Most of the regular bookstores have a margin of 15 to 20% for the middle range of books. In some of the cases, the margin is just Rs10/- or Rs 15/- for a book priced at around Rs 200/- or Rs 250/-.  Some booksellers were not willing to part with details about the margins they enjoyed.

While for the regular bookstores the sales is pretty much the same throughout the year, for the second hand bookstores and pavement booksellers, the months of June and July are clearly the 'boom season', because that is when schools and colleges reopen. 

Speaking of pavement booksellers, there are more than a dozen of them dotting Pycroft's Road. Most have been at the same spot for more than five or six years.  Arumugan, who has been here for the last seven years says, that the pavement booksellers open shop at around three in the evening and are open till around eight or nine in the night.

"We buy at about 40% of the original price from students and then put a mark-up price which would give us a margin of about 10 to 15% and resell them.  This is done mostly for books, which are quite good in condition, and are just over a year old.  For older books, it depends on their condition.  The advent of book banks and also now the practise of giving old books by the seniors to the juniors at least till the syllabus is changed have robbed us of our trade.  For us, the monsoon or rains means that we have to shut shop since the sky is our roof and when it pours we have to get our books back to where we store them" says Mohan another pavement book seller.

The organised second hand book stores which are housed in proper stores, are however dying a slow death.  While a few years back there were quite a few second hand bookstores, the Universal Bookstore is today the only one and is being slowly squeezed out of business as volumes have dropped.  For these bookstores, only higher volumes mean profit, because their margins are very low.

An interesting snippet is that at least a couple of shops have sister establishments either at Mount Road or Parry's.  And there was one thing about which all three kinds of booksellers agreed, that nowadays, there was a very low demand for books.

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