“What do you do with the books that don’t sell?”
I was in an independent bookstore, talking to the owner about the challenges of running a brick and mortar outlet in the times of Amazon and Flipkart.
“I usually have a sale-or-return policy,” she replied. “If the books don’t sell, I simply return them to the publishers.”
“Oh, but all of them don’t take back the books, no? I know a couple of publishers who simply ask the retailers to pulp the books.”
“Yeah, there are those people too. They find the cost of taking the book back higher than the loss of sales.”
“So what do you do with those books?”
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Minakhi Misra 