| Earthworm Books was first founded as a bookshop at a time, when cheap books were being imported in large quantities. This was done by entrepreneurs travelling to the West, mainly the US and buying at cheap almost throw away costs what is known as 'seconds' or 'remainders' from publishing houses there who wanted to liquidate their inventory. Huge profits were made by buying books at a dollar or half a dollar and less in large quantities and selling in India at ten or twenty times the price and as "imported books". A kind of 'dumping' in a pre-WTO world and using a post-WTO term. This also led to the phenomenon of 'mega stores' and books shops metamorphosing to something like book supermarkets and 'bookshops' becoming landmarks! The mega bookstores have now become shopping malls and mall chains and mall empires. That is another story to talk about later.
While this was one kind of phenomenon, the other was given the context of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the country faced multiple and multidimensional crises political, economic and ecological (this was the early stages of the globalisation phenomena), demand for books on ecology, environment, good healthy living, globalisation, WTO and so on was increasing. One could say that the middle classes and those who could have access to books in English were looking for books to come to grips with the changing situations. Later in 'Book Talk' we will talk to what was and is happening in language publishing especially South Indian languages. Given at that time, the main library market in India has always been Delhi (it still is) some nondescript (by this we mean not the better known and established) Delhi based publishers were churning out books, recycling matter (often plagiarising) from other books and packaging books with impressive titles and selling books at high prices, first for the institutional library market in Delhi and later in other parts of the country. This was posing problems not only for individual book buyers, teachers and the like but also honest librarians with a sense of dedication to their profession and to good books. We add the adjective 'honest' to librarians, because the book selling business also involves corruption! So, if a honest librarian in an institution is genuinely interested in stocking her or his institution's library with good books, he or she would have a hard time accessing, evaluating and buying good books. Individual book buyers had even more of a hard time. This was what led to the idea of Earthworm Books. In a sense we pioneered the concept of pre-selecting books, prohibiting salesmen from what is known as 'ragdi' (Hindi word for old paper for recycling) publishers from Delhi from coming to our bookshop and indirectly creating an ethic of book stocking, selling and buying of books.
The situation has changed of course now, with many or almost all leading publishers in the world having set up shop in India. Though the book distributors and the book distribution business does continue to strangle publishers, especially smaller niche publishers. Book distribution commissions start from 45 per cent and upwards. The emergence of websites and online selling could change all this. But in many regions with poor internet links, the problem will continue. Even before the arrival of the Internet, accessing good books in smaller towns and semi-urban areas has always been a problem. This is also why Earthworm pioneered the concept of taking books to people and has had very successful (for book publishers and buyers) book exhibitions and book marketing fairs conducted in small towns in Karnataka and Tamilnadu. Though we have for now closed our bookshop and sales outlets and are busy concentrating setting up our business online, we realise people still love to go to a bookshop feel and see the books and buy and we will hopefully not before long come back with our unique small bookshop for the whole family.
In this metamorphosis, not from Earthworms to other worms (this we have left to those who have tried to imitate us and capture the markets we have created) but from bookshop to an online shop we are also trying to face up to the new contexts. Some of our friends and supporters and of whom we have a large number and who have also been our greatest source of inspiration and encouragement, may see these changes as typical Earthworm style going underground. Not really. We are only transforming ourselves to meet the new contexts, but we are aware that people credit us with having introduced a unique concept in book selling and many still ask for us. If our concept made us unique it has also resulted in many trying to imitate us. After us many other bookshops like us came into existence, imitation being the best compliment that can be paid to us. We are also happy that a new space of competition for alternative books was created by us. This is good news for the small publishers. Some booksellers trying to occupy the alternative bookseller space created by us have tried to graft themselves on to us and claim that they were born from the Earthworm bookshop and thus have tried to also own us. They have had spurious stories written about themselves, as so called 'outlook' stories and created fanciful histories of Earthworm Books, by unethical, unprofessional and opportunistic (lazy?) journalists, who never bother to cross-check any of their stories, in this case with any of us who have been the founders and associated with in developing Earthworm Books as a concept. Walter Benjamin, once famously wrote, "Books and harlots have their quarrels in public'. Some publishers and booksellers fall within this statement of Walter Benjamin. He also wrote, "It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed". |
