Kashmir's Prominent Bookshop Downs Shutters As Sales Plummet

Mannequins draped in embroidered dresses replaced the stands showcasing books at what was Kashmir’s famous stop for bibliophiles. The shelves of the shop, known by the name of Bestseller, which showcased all sorts of books from Islamic literature to Western fiction, in the heart of Srinagar in Lal Chowk, are now full of hand-stitched garments.

Thirty-two-year-old Sani Yasnain, who used to run the bookstore and carry on his father’s business, said that they closed it and switched to selling hand-stitched clothes after sales declined significantly. He attributed the fall in sales largely to the preference of people for buying books from online platforms.

“Our daily sales plummeted heavily. From around Rs 20,000 daily sales, it went down to around 2000 per day before we closed the bookstore in April. There were no buyers as people preferred to pick up books from online platforms like Amazon and Flipkart,” said Sani.

The bookshop was a favourite haunt for book lovers, not only from Srinagar, but even rural parts of Kashmir before its closure. The owners have still kept with the name Bestseller on the display board, and some old customers feel dejected at the sight of garments replacing books here.

Sani said that after completing his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from a private university in Pune, he decided to carry forward the family business of running the book shop and even left a job with a paint manufacturing company in 2016.

Sani did his initial education from Kashmir’s prominent school, Tyndale Biscoe school, which faces his shop, and later continued his college education from Kashmir only before pursuing an MBA from Pune.

"We were mostly selling religious books and that on Kashmiri politics and history, but I added the fiction titles too, and it was all doing great before sales started going down over one and a half years back,” said Sani.

“While the people picking up books online was the prime reason for this decline, lack of parking space in the Lal Chowk after it was redeveloped as part of the smart city project was also one of the reasons for the sales dropping heavily. We had no option but to close down the business,” said Sani.

He said that the family depended entirely on the book sales, and his father was doing good and even managed to impart him and his brother a proper education from the shop earnings. His brother is working in Dubai and has done BTech, he said. But from what is left of what was once a prosperous business is a pile of unsold stock of books at his house worth over Rs 15 lakh.

“Publishers will give us books on credit, but on Amazon and other platforms, they sell them for cash, and so they give higher discounts. Even as we started giving discounts on the books for specific days in a month, but also that didn’t help much. It didn't work,” he said.