For the love of books

It has been over two and a half months since we launched, and from day one itself  we’ve been getting requests for ‘Gifting’ options. In fact, we ourselves have longed for such a service for some time now but could never really find a reliable one. Many a times, I have personally wanted to surprise a friend/cousin but there was nothing useful unless I wanted to send flowers through Ferns and Petals.

So to us the idea of enabling a gift option on our store always held a lot of appeal but what hastened our decision was a simple market research. Further, has anyone really tried to find out how many people search for the following terms on Google?

‘Send Gifts India’

‘Gift a Book’

‘Send Books’

Many do!! So here we are – formally announcing our new Gift Wrap options for sending books to anywhere within India.

Some of you, who have been regular visitors to our site, might be wondering what’s this all about when this option has already existed for a while now. Yes, the option was there but it was in the initial testing phase where we tried out various measures to ensure that the nice gift-wrapped packets don’t get damaged during transit. We wanted to ensure that the wrapping remained intact and the whole package appealed aesthetically to the recipients so as to bring a smile on their face.

And now we can claim with confidence that it will!

Here’s how we gift wrap the books for your special ones :

The book is first bubble-wrapped and put in a nice strong cardboard box – like every regular order of ours. We then gift-wrap the box and tie a red ribbon onto it. See the image. This gift-pack is then protected by two layers of bubble-wrap so as to prevent the paper from tearing. The address label is then put on the bubble-wrap and finally sealed in a transparent plastic bag. Phew!

A gift, nicely wrapped, can really make a person smile!!

How many of us tear through the wrapping paper whenever we receive a gift because we cannot bear to wait any longer? Or we un-layer it slowly and methodically, all the time heightening our anticipation of what the gift might be and who it might be that sent it to us?

Did we tell you that the recipient is given no clues whatsoever to indicate who has sent the gift until the packet is opened and out pops a personal note from within the book?

Here’s how ‘you’ go about sending the gift:

Select the book you want to gift and add it to your cart. In the cart, check box the Gift-Wrap option and proceed to complete the order. Once you have received the order confirmation email just reply back with the text for the note that you wish to be included. Or you may send a mail to orders@lebooks.in quoting your order number.

The note can be as small as a few lines or a complete letter, which can fit onto a double-sided white-A4 sheet with normal margins.

We realize that mailing the note back to us is not the smoothest way of doing it, and ideally a text-box for the note or an option to upload a text file should be implemented, which we soon will.

Ohh, did we mention that there is a small charge for this? Yep, there is. We have kept it reasonably low at Rs 30 per packet while still offering our discounts and free shipping.

We do hope that you like our offering. If you have any ideas that can help us improve your experience and make this service more valuable to you then do share them and leave your comments below.

You know that man? The one who wakes up, doesn’t want to go to work, but has to go to work because of the paycheck. Wandering about doing daily, mundane tasks, cheerful but meaningless. But at the back of his head, there is always one question: “What is the score?”

Rain Men is a very funny book about such men. A few men who start their own cricket team (the Captain Scott Invitation XI), under hopes of being very good, and are in reality very bad. Men who are more interested in touring other village cricket teams for the lunch and high tea than playing. A team that has a “Tom Cairns Award” for the worst bowler of the year, named after Tom Cairns who had a bowling average of 102 in the first year of the club!

You might find it to not be a book about cricket, but rather a book about human nature. About a bunch of guys getting together but not getting along. However, at the end, it is a book about cricket. See, for example, the types of bowlers:
1) The perennially angry fast bowler – Remember Andre Nel?
2) The short-arse – The short, but really really quick bowler.
3) The colonial cousin – The general feeling that any tall West Indian bowler will be fast… dangerously fast.
4) The ex-fast bowler – They just refuse to retire.
5) The loose popgun – Could be a hatrick, could be 3 wides.
6) The sensitive flower – Can bowl well only if not being attacked
7) Mr Corridor of Uncertainty.
The donkey-dipper – Full tosses, over pitched deliveries. As described, “the arc is magnificent, so is the violence with which the batsman customarily greets it.”
9) The unlucky bowler
10) The useless stranger – Remember Noel David?
11) Mr. Try Everything Once
12) The Enigma

As the Times Literary Supplement says
“If you have ever gone in number eight on a hatrick and doubled your team’s score with a streaky boundary first ball… then there is only one cricket book for you, and Marcus Berkmann has written it.”

This is the original post

I just came across this article “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation” in New York Times and could not help but agree with most of the points mentioned there. Many articles have been written before on this subject, where they compare our investor environment with that of the Silicon Valley. However, most of them miss out on one crucial aspect. It is not just the change of the environment with more incubators for startups that is required or the need for the Government to make bureaucracy less tiresome but it is our mindset that has to change.

We, Indians, are highly risk-averse people. Right from our childhood our upbringing is such that parents encourage us to dream of becoming doctors and engineers so that our life is set. You may eventually branch out to some other field but it is so. Further, our educational system is oriented more towards rote-learning, and testing us on facts rather than on concepts, and forget the whole  personality development part of it.

Even in IITs and IIMs exams are such that if you do not study the whole semester but on the last day, you can get through. Very few professors actually test you on your clarity of concepts, who encourage you to apply yourself. Further, so much importance is paid to hard-core numerical subjects that softer skill-based courses are so often ignored. Just go to any IIM and you can see for yourself – students toiling under the burden of 8-9 finance electives in their second year just to get that “one” course, which will be instrumental in making or breaking their future in an I-bank.

And what do they miss out on? Courses like Strategic Business Negotiation, Advanced Oral Communication, and Entrepreneurship, etc. I would say these were probably the best courses I had taken during my MBA. It is these HR courses that eventually help you in your professional and personal life.

As a community, we Indians generally get married latest by 28-29 years of age. And with marriage comes responsibility and pressure to be earning well enough to support our family. This trend is something totally missing in the West.

In Israel, which is a great hub for entrepreneurship – the second-largest after the US in LifeSciences, people are drafted into the army and when they are released they have a whole world of opportunity lying out there in open. In the US, it is not uncommon for people to do MBBS after their engineering just because they had a change of heart.

In India, is it even imaginable? We are urged to finish off our education in one go. School –> College —> MBA —> Job. Why not an year or two of job before MBA? If I enroll myself in an MBA school in the US now, I  probably would belong to the youngest bracket of my class. Why is it that if someone fails CAT, his life is ruined because his friend has made through and will be earning his 24 lacs for one extra year?

Take our own example, when we, Rajat and I, had wanted to chuck our calls, we were under pressure to reconsider and do our MBA first. The reasoning was that a diploma from IIMs is a safety net in case we failed. Only one or two thought about mentioning the fact that it might help us better understand business nuances. It just reflects the mindset of people around us.

So all I am saying is that it is not just the investor and regulatory environment, which is to be blamed here. We ourselves are a part of the problem. India once had a flourishing trade and was one of the richest countries in the world. Over 150 years of foreign rule has culled our spirit of entrepreneurship, which was followed by the so-called “Hindu” rate of growth. It is the 21st century now, and we have come a long way. We are roaring to go forward.

Let us not replace the Civil Services and Government jobs of erstwhile India with private high-paying safety nets. Let us instead shape our destiny with our own hands and bring a change from within before we lament the lack of innovation in India.

So the next time if someone compares you to Amazon and says – “You are the Amazon of India”, then your answer should better be “Patience my friend, you have seen nothing yet!”

Chandler: Hey, I just came across this really cool site LeBooks.in, which offers great discounts on books and also free shipping!

Ross: I also know of this other site, some Indie… Wait did you say FREE shipping??

~~

Consumers love free shipping, we all do. In fact who doesn’t?

Consider this:- Site A offers free shipping on all orders worth more than Rs. 150 while site B charges Rs. 10 per book and yet another site C charges a flat Rs. 30 per order. Which of the three sites do you think would be more popular?

My bet is site A. Simply because despite different discount structures, there is one thing constant, which Ross will always remember and that is site A ships for free. Site A has created a great marketing tool. Besides, by offering free shipping, site A is telling Ross upfront how much a book will cost even before he adds it to the cart and this enriches his customer experience. He need not undergo the hassle of adding a book to the cart and checking out till the end to know the final amount!! So even if Site A is at times not matching the discount by Site B or site C, the former is still expected to fare better, ceteris paribus.

In the Indian context, there is another factor. For some reason, as much as we Indians love free shipping we also hate paying for it. Better give us lower discounts but don’t ask us to pay for shipping. Why is it so?

Maybe it’s because we have been conditioned to think so from the early heydeys of e-commerce in India when ebay.in was still Baazee.

I remember sellers luring buyers by offering outrageous discounts and then in turn outraging them by levying ludicrous shipping charges to cover their costs.

In the West it is a well-established practice to pay for shipping. Even Amazon, which any Indian swears e-commerce by, charges for shipping unless the order amount is more than $25. In our case it would have translated to orders worth more than Rs. 750. Free shipping over there is used to incentivize the customers to buy in bulk; in fact there is a free shipping day. So why do we not also follow their practice rather than make a habit out of it here?

I would someday really like to explore this psychology of ours because when we were contemplating our own shipping policy for LeBooks.in, I myself was vociferous that we not charge anything!

The White Tiger is a book which I picked up with no particular but solely for the author sharing his name ( the exact spelling) with my brother. (So that shows how I pick books now!) Anyhow, on starting the book you also start seeing the poverty from those who sweep our roads, clean the cars, and drive us around in taxis and auto rickshaws. It would be only too common to say that ‘ we do not see what happens in their homes’! This is anyhow true, but what would be more true is that we do not know what they dream to have and what they are willing to do to achieve this. The times described when innocent drivers are asked to take blame for their employers fault seems something which we might read in the news papers and here we have someone whose whole life is changed by this single event which was a very instantaneous suggestion from his employers. I bet they didn’t know the repercussions that this tweaking of justice would have.

It is certainly an interesting read with insights into what the world of politics and luxury look like to many in India. Though this is not something which would leave a lasting impact of sorts.

You can check out the original review at my blog – Vector Gaming