By Mukta K. Gupta, IANS
Mysore : So you thought the book-reading habit was on the decline? A bookstore that has opened here with over 200,000 titles in English and 80,000 in the local Kannada language is set to prove you wrong.
Sapna Book House, a multi-level 18,000 sq ft fully air-conditioned mall in Devraja Mohalla of Mysore city of Karnataka, in southern India, claims to be the largest book showroom in the country.
Krishna Soni, the branch manager, told IANS: “There is no visible impact of the Internet as far as the sale of books is concerned. The response from Mysoreans has been encouraging.”
Opened by a Gujarati business family, Sapna Book House already has four branches in Bangalore. The Mysore store is the fifth.
“The store here was opened because of the large base of students and the academic community in Mysore, which has so many schools and colleges. They had to go all the way to Bangalore to buy books, so we decided why not take the store to their doorstep in order to save them from all the hassles.”
He was confident about the company’s expansion plans and hinted that the company was eyeing the northern Karnataka market.
It was Bhanumati Suresh Chand Shah, the wife of company chairman Suresh Chand Shah, who thought of opening a bookshop in Bangalore when her husband was working in the book publishing business way back in 1967.
“As the days passed our bookshop on Majestic Road in Bangalore expanded and we subsequently branched out to other places,” she said.
Her three sons – Nitin, Deepak and Paresh – are closely associated with the business and live in a joint family set-up even today.
Karnataka Culture Minister H.S. Mahadevaprasad, who was present when the store was inaugurated last week, said Mysore was turning into a high tech city and therefore a large book mall had become a necessity.