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Is the pandemic bringing down the curtains on independent bookstores and publishers?
Sohel Parvez
Redwanur Rahman Jewel’s dreams had come true when he opened his bookstore in May last year as it soon turned into a veritable hub for readers and writers alike.
However, little more than a year after the library was opened, Jewel’s dreams were shattered.
On 27 July, Jewel closed down his bookstore ‘Nalonda’ after failing to sustain the business following a nosedive in sales during the recently concluded nationwide shutdown of all economic activities that began on 26 March to flatten the curve on coronavirus.
While the curve was not flattened, the livelihoods of many like Jewel’s were snuffed out for good.
“Not one book enthusiast showed up and so, we could not make a single penny during the lockdown while the situation was similar in June. So, we decided to shut down the business as it not possible to carry on while incurring heavy losses every month,” he added.
Operating the 900 square-foot shop located at the capital’s Elephant Road near the Kataban intersection required Tk 100,000 in monthly expenses, including Tk 55,000 as rent.
On normal business days, the owner could make up the expenses from his sales, leading Jewel to believe that they would be able to make some margin in the July-August period were things going well.
“Our store had begun to become popular,” said Jewel, who is also a publisher.
Nalonda perhaps best exemplifies how Bangladesh’s creative publishing sector has so far coped with the ongoing crisis thrown up by the rogue pathogen originating from Wuhan, China.
The pandemic has put the existence of the large number of small publishers and bookstores in Bangladesh into question.
Bangladesh has nearly 250 regular publishers of creative books that publish nearly 5,000 titles annually, mainly to mark the month-long annual book fair, the Ekushey Boi Mela.
The fair offers publishers with the scope to display and sell new books and reprints. Nearly Tk 100 crore worth of books are sold during the exposition each year.
However, there is no proper estimate of book sales for the rest of the year.
The amount is likely to be about Tk 400 crore, said Farid Ahmed, president of the Academic and Creative Publishers Association of Bangladesh (ACPAB), while sharing his guesstimate.
After the event concludes at the end of February, publishers engage in marketing and distributing books to retailers in March and April.
However, the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent shutdown has seriously hampered that regular tradition. Not only have stores been shut, but purchases from educational institutions have also been affected by the closure.
“Books that were supposed to be distributed have remained in stock,” said Ahmed, also the proprietor of Somoy Prakashan.
Sales tumbled amid shutdown but demand began to recover in June after the country reopened. However, overall sales remained lower than what it was a year earlier, according to various publishers.
The ratio of sales to losses varies from publisher to publisher with some calculating the slump in turnover to be as much as 60 per cent year-on-year.
The ACPAB president estimated that overall, businesses lost about Tk 200 crore to Tk 250 crore in creative book sales in the April-July period.
If the drop in sales for all books, including creative, academic and other related books are taken into consideration, the total value lost to pandemic would be between Tk 2,500 to Tk 3,000 crore, said Shamal Paul, vice-president of the Bangladesh Publishers & Book Sellers Association (BPBSA).
Meanwhile, the publishing sector’s annual turnover would be about Tk 10,000 to Tk 12,000 crore, he said.
Prabir Das
The ongoing pandemic has compelled nearly 10 per cent of the country’s bookstores to shut their operations due to a drastic fall in income. The photo was taken from the capital’s Elephant Road at the end of July, when Nalonda bookshop was closing its doors.
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