Out of the rest 75-80%, a sizeable chunk is from Bengaluru. About 5 to 7% of the Kannada users are from outside India, and about 15% are from Indian states other than Karnataka. He says the readership is high for personality development articles, and light-reading topics like love, marriage and others.ĭailyhunt, in an email to this reporter, says 70% of its users are aged below 35. He signed up with Dailyhunt, a Bengaluru-based app for news and information in English and other regional languages, to provide content on their platform. Sushrutha Dodderi is a Kannada writer, poet and blogger.
What are they reading? Are they not reading at all? Or does their interest lie elsewhere? He says 80% of the Kannada book sales happens in Bengaluru. “It is the buying power they have due to employment and financial status, that’s at play here,” he says. The Kannada books buyers these days are generally employed and well-settled, and aged above 35 years. But the reason, Vasudhendra says, is the economy. Sale of Kannada books has been increasing over the years. Vasudhendra says the quality of the books has been improving - be it the production, cover page design, layouts or writing. Even the Bengaluru Book Exhibition has stopped these days, so the space for publicising books has decreased, rues Guruprasad. Book exhibitions do not take place at the desired scale. Smaller bookshops are becoming a rarity these days, in most parts of Bengaluru. But, literary criticism is a dead space in Kannada, with literary magazines dying a quick death, and mainstream newspapers not doing enough to publicise new books, says Guruprasad. How are new authors introduced to readers? Book reviews are great tools to achieve this. “What is already well-known gets read more and more,” he says. But this doesn’t reach expected readership levels. Along with publishing content on current topics, he has been working on introducing many new authors, through the website, by writing about them and giving space for their work. Kuntady Nithesh, co-founder of the website Ruthumana, agrees with this. There is no tradition of people asking for the books of new Kannada writers, he says. Along with women’s literature, he says the books written by Shivarama Karanth, Poornachandra Tejaswi and Lankesh are in the best seller category. Guruprasad D Narayana runs a bookshop, Akruthi Book House, that offers the visitors a curated collection of books. He says most women readers have shifted allegiance to television soaps, that portray a similar Bengaluru-centric upper middle class culture and language. However, the volume of sales of this category has also reduced with time, observes Bengaluru-based ex-techie-turned-author and publisher Vasudhendra Chandra. Bookshops continue to sell many copies of these books. Saisuthe, H G Radhadevi, Usha Navarathna Rram and Anupama Niranjana, whose stories revolve around a Bengaluru-centric lower and upper middle class culture and social situations, had a huge following of women as readers. Many of them were written long ago, but are still in demand. These are the books written by women and appeal to women.
The neatly stacked Kannada novels written by Saisuthe and H G Radhadevi in a corner of the Rainbow bookshop give another insight into what sells: popular women-centric fiction is still a hit. Some of the bestsellers among Kannada books. A peek into the bookshop gives an idea about what sells in Kannada: shlokas, prayers, jokes, cooking, personality development, short stories of personalities and a few children’s collections are on the ‘hot’ category. Though not comparable to big bookshops in the city, this shop stocks only what sells. What sells the most?Ī few metres ahead, there is another formal bookshop: the Rainbow Book Exhibition. He handles a courier collection franchise, to help himself break even in the business. He just says Kannada book buyers are becoming a minority with the passage of time. Gupta, the proprietor, a man in his 60s seems uncomfortable talking about his sales and membership. Many contemporary Kannada magazines, shloka and devotional literature occupy the front, visible part of the small shop. A quick look at the book collection on the Rajyothsava day reveals many English pulp fiction - but no Kannada books.Ī few shops ahead, there is a board: ‘Gupta Circulating Library.’ The shop houses many old books - bound, numbered and neatly stacked, presumably constituting the library part of it. Nestled close to the famous Holige Mane and Bhagyalakshmi Gulkhan shop is an informal bookshop, next to the pavement. Sampige Road, the road that leads to Malleshwaram, has something to offer to everyone. Roadside book vendors don’t stock Kannada books.