Romanians spend $300,000 in virtual bookshops

Many Romanians are using the Internet only to surf worldwide sites, send e-greetings, chat and play online games.

But few consider the Internet as a means of enriching their libraries at home, without having to go from a bookshop to another.

The operators on this market claim Romanians spend some $300,000 every year to buy books from the domestic virtual shops. Revenues account for some 3% of the turnover of publishing houses or companies in this business. Whereas at raft.ro revenues from e-commerce account for 2% of the turnover posted by the company owning the site, the sales made through virtual shops such as teora.ro and Diverta Online represent less than 1% of the amounts cashed by the retail networks.

Librariile Humanitas is the only publishing house boasting 3%. The Romanian online book market is rather atypical, as compared with the global market. Most of the publishing houses created their sites in order to promote their offer in the first place, while selling came second. The entrepreneurs were braver and began selling books on the Internet, although they were not backed by a publisher. “The sites of publishing houses have a double role: to inform the public about the book offers and, only afterwards, to act as a virtual bookshop,” Theodor Raducanu, director of Teora, explained.

Romanians are generally fond of literature and their orders for online books average 200,000 – 300,000 ROL. The Romanians living abroad spend some $45, as otherwise they cannot find many bookshops selling literature in their native language.

The bookshop managers agree the potential of the business is quite impressive, but selling books online is slowed down especially by the limited use of Internet and credit cards in Romania.
iuliana.susanu@zf.ro