City bookstores turn new chapter as better sales, lower rent push growth

In 2010, Ajay Jain, a travel writer and photographer, opened Kunzum Travel Café in Delhi's Hauz Khas village.

- Manoj Sharma

NEW DELHI: The quaint café, which became quite popular with travel writers, artists, and photographers, shut down during the first lockdown in 2020. But Jain was not deterred. Last year, he launched five bookshops across the National Capital Region between July and October - Kunzum Books to the surprise of many observers since the future of bookstores seemed bleak a few years ago.

"Our travel café was a great success and we used to organise more than 200 events in a year.

This encouraged me to open full-fledged bookshops that doubled up as a community and cultural spaces," says Jain. "The plan behind opening five stores in a short period was to make a mark and instantly capture the imagination of book lovers," he adds.

Not just Kunzum, several new bookshops have opened across Delhi/National Capital Region (NCR) recently and many Delhi bookstores are opening their outlets in other cities, too, in what looks like a post-pandemic boom for brick-and-mortar bookstores - a trend observed in many cities across the world.

"I think book sales are booming because during the pandemic, many people re-discovered the joys of reading, finding it as a sort of therapeutic. Worried about their increasing screen time, many parents encouraged their children to read books," says Aditya Sharma, a children's writer.