A bestseller on the Net

And a neat little package to reinforce the reading habit

Umesh Anand

For someone with such distinguished initials, G B S Bindra has no literary pretensions. And yet he is ambitiously turning the musty world of Indian publishing and book distribution on its head.
Mr Bindra used to work for Quark, the international publishing software company, in India. A couple of years ago he took off on his own to launch firstandsecond.com, an angel investor in tow and a load of hopes of using the Internet to explore new efficiencies in the books business.

It was his gamble that the market was many times the size most retailers and distributors anticipated it to be. There was scope, he believed, for customising choice and creating a virtual community of people who loved books or simply needed them quickly.

In a graveyard of Internet businesses, firstandsecond.com now lays claim to a healthy existence. It has an operating margin of 30 per cent and it has done Rs 2 crore of sales in the first year of its existence. Its subscriber base has galloped to 700,000. This means that at any time Mr Bindra has a vast number of customers spread all over the country and abroad. These are people who regularly receive his e-mails, access his noticeboards and share their views on books. Mr Bindra’s next move will be to get into music CDs.
But before that it is worth seeing how the Internet has helped him spin his own weave with books.

firstandsecond.com uses the Internet to combine into one the roles of publisher, distributor, retailer and reviewer. You can visit the site and place an order for a volume with the guarantee that it will be delivered the next day. You can pay by credit card or in cash on delivery. Mr Bindra says 50 per cent of customers prefer to pay with their cards.

Once the order has been placed on the Internet, the action shifts to the collection and supply system which Mr Bindra has built up. His entire success is based on logistics. A warehouse based in Daryaganj in Delhi, for instance, gives him ready access to the warehouses of a wide range of publishers. So all that he has to do is get a book picked up from down the street, pack it and courier it off.

“It is like turning the entire area into your own warehouse or bookshop,” says Mr Bindra. “Ordinarily one would walk through the rows of one’s own stock. Now you treat the other warehouses as an extension of your own premises.”

Building the huge base of subscribers that he has has required similar innovation. He has moved along with small bursts of creative salesmanship. For instance, he picked up a huge number of copies of the Guinness Book of Records at a throwaway price months before a new edition was due. He then advertised in Bangalore that a free copy of the Guinness Book was available for those who logged into his site. In a matter of days his subscriber base had swelled by several thousand. In addition, when he kept his word and delivered the book free, he won the confidence of his customers. “It made people think,” says Mr Bindra. “If we had kept our commitment and provided a copy of the Guinness Book free, we were obviously to be trusted. People could rely on us and place orders with their cards and so on.”

The key to Mr Bindra’s success has been his ability to exploit the interactive potential of the Internet for the special requirements of the book trade. “A book sells when people talk about it,” he says. “The role that a review plays is to make a book the subject of conversation. It does not matter whether it is a good review or a bad review. People should talk about the book. On firstandsecond.com we achieve this by encouraging ordinary readers to write reviews and posting them on our noticeboard.”

He has also changed the scale of the reach that a distributor can have by sending out e-mails on new offerings to each of his 700,000 subscribers. So his intimations reach computer screens in homes and offices, which is a huge jump from the traditional poster and launch-party theatrics.

Mr Bindra’s most recent coup was to get actress Tara Deshpande to do an interactive thriller on his site. She wrote the first chapter and people were invited to write the second and she would the third and so on. More than 150,000 people have read the thriller in the making and 20,000 have actually downloaded it. Several hundred have tried their hand at writing the chapters along with Tara Deshpande. For the Indian book trade, where editions rarely go beyond two thousand copies, these are whopping numbers and Mr Bindra seems to have pulled off a bestseller for reinforcing the reading habit.