Online book stores look to the next chapter

Although Romania generally embraces global trends, many people still don’t trust online payment services, with card payment relatively low and a general skepticism over electronic payment. Online bookshops are, however, a growing trend on the market, along with other online-related services, prepared for the worst due to the crisis and old mentalities, yet hoping for the best with an extending market segment’s openness towards innovation and international trends.

Corina Dumitrescu

Local online bookshop service providers range from entrepreneurs on their own right, operating only online, and the e-stores of established names with real-world bookshops. Buybooks.ro and librarie.net fit in the first category, Carturesti and Libris in the second.

BuyBooks was established five years ago. According to shareholder Adinel Tudor, people are “caught in their busy day-to-day schedule and since we don’t have time to enter a book store, the store will come to us, online. The online retail market is on a constant growth spurt and this tendency had to somehow be reflected in the online book acquisition market.”

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The total investment in the firm so far is over EUR 100,000, a fraction of the EUR 1 million outlay planned in the next five years, for the site to remain market leader. Much of that sum will go on promotion, storage facilities and hardware and software solutions. The firm’s best selling genre is fiction, closely followed by children’s literature and legal publications.

Gigel Chiazna, Librarie.net owner, said he first thought about launching an online bookshop in 2000, when, as a student, he wanted to raise cash by selling some of his old books. Annoyed by time wasted at used book stores, he first posted online ads then decided to launch his own site for such services in 2001, in association with his brother.

The advantage of Librarie.net, says Chiazna, lies in its experience on the market: “By selling online since 2001, our growth was organic and simultaneous with the market, so it would be fair to say that we helped increase the confidence Romanians currently have in online commerce.” The firm still sells used books as well as new titles.

Libris has sold books for 19 years through its own chain of stores in Brasov. The online service was launched in 2009, during the crisis, a time which Laura Muresan, coordinator of the online sales department, describes as “our moment. The fact that we went against the general tide only served to mobilize us and to stimulate our creativity.”

The investment so far is EUR 80,000, as many of the necessary resources were already in place for the firm’s offline bookstores. The investment process was continued through the launch of a more spacious deposit, allowing faster deliveries to customers. Muresan sees the offline and online environments as complementary in the bookselling business, as book promotion can and should be done through various of means, such as launches, debates, fairs, festivals, blogs and whatever else the future might bring.

Carturesti, the well-known offline book retail chain, with a music and stationery store as well as a tearoom, added the online facility to its portfolio in order to meet the public’s requirements. The initial investment in its online service was EUR 70,000, according to Mihaela Rotaru, Carturesti.ro manager, who believes that the next three to four years will see this facility develop, necessitating constant future investment.

Georgiana Iordache, the firm’s online sales consultant, drew up a portrait of the typical client of the book store: he/she is between 25 and 45 years old, well educated, professional, and has little time to visit actual “bricks & mortar” bookshops. Social media aficionados are also an important target of Carturesti.ro.

Some of the online bookstore’s best sold titles are in personal development, general cultural improvement, taste refinement and the understanding of contemporary phenomena. The competitive advantage that Carturesti seems to hold, to Rotaru’s mind, lies in the “consistent experience that the brand holds in traditional retail, in direct contact with the consumer of cultural products”.

The biggest difficulty that such online services face is the general lack of trust with which Romanians regard online payments. Several studies show Romanians’ suspicion over card payments and electronic transactions. They use cards to make payments once every one and a half months, a slight improvement on the end of 2009, when the average was once every month and three weeks. This puts Romania at the bottom of the list of card usage among Europeans.

The situation is a bit worse for electronic payments, as only a mere 1.5 percent of a total of 84.4 million card payments are made electronically by Romanians within and outside the country, according to Netopia System, a major player in the online micro-payment market. What’s more, in 2009, there was one online transaction for every 10 cards, according to the same company’s assessment.

All in all, representatives of all the above companies see online bookshops as a growing market, which although it will continue to be affected by the crisis, will also continue to develop. “Online book selling will evolve in the coming years, with the growth of technology and consumption paradigm. The printed book will not disappear, ebook platforms are on an ascending line, and the convergence of mobile devices (laptop, telephone, ultra-mobile computers) will weigh more and more in the future development. Companies who evolve will grow,” concluded Tudor of BuyBooks.