Source : Times of India
Foraying into a new arena, Delhi-based publishing house Niyogi Books will launch its own store later this month in Kolkata for exclusive display and sale of all its books. Not many publishing houses have their own bookstores with Delhi-based Roli Books (CMYK stores), DC Books (Kerala) and Seagull (Kolkata) among the few in business. Niyogi’s bookstore will be located at Kolkata’s famous College Street.
“Niyogi Books now has more than 500 titles under its belt of varying shape and size, genre and content, and it is an opportunity to showcase all these under one roof to all our readers as well as distributors,” says managing director and publisher of Niyogi Books, Bikash De Niyogi about the new venture.
“Through this bookstore, we would like to throw light on the exclusivity of these books which might get lost in the layers of distribution. This bookstore, will in turn, also help us increase our visibility through our existing channels of distribution,” he says.
The bookshop will be launched on August 24 and “will be our ‘signature store’, wherein we will be exclusively displaying and selling all our books -from our first to the latest title,” he says.
But why Kolkata? “It is true that Delhi has the highest density of English language publishers in the country. However, Kolkata’s College Street is India’s largest book market, lending it the endearing sobriquet of ‘Boi Para’ or ‘Book Town’. But, for many of us book lovers, it is more so like the ‘Mecca of books’.
“Thus, despite Delhi being the centre of our publishing activity, we thought College Street would be the most auspicious beginning to our retailing activities,” Niyogi says.
Known for publishing large-format books or what is commonly referred to as coffee-table books, Niyogi Books launched three imprints in January – Thornbird (translation), Olive Turtle (fiction) and Paper Missile (non-fiction).
