Over the last few years, book lovers have got accustomed to wringing their hands (metaphorically), sighing deeply and writing nostalgic obituaries over the closure of yet another of their favourite haunts — whether it’s Fact & Fiction in Basant Lok in New Delhi or Premier Bookstore in Bengaluru. Stratospheric rents, competition from the online ecommerce giants and the passing on of that knowledgeable, idiosyncratic owner are the usual suspects for the downing of shutters. Even for used books, bibliophiles feel Flora Fountain in Mumbai is pretty much dead, the famous Sunday market in Delhi’s Darya Ganj not quite what it used to be and Kolkata’s College Street a sellout to academic textbooks.All that gloom and doom only burnishes the triumph of Bengaluru’s Blossom Book House, the city’s much loved purveyor of used books on Church Street. The three-storey 3,500 sq ft bookshop with stacks of mostly used and some new books has not just survived but thrived. On Thursday, proprietor Mayi Gowda opened his second store spread over a massive 8,650 sq ft, just down the road from the first. The timing is interesting: the opening comes barely two months after online shopping leader Amazon launched its own used books section on its website and four months after offline rival Bookworm took up a similar space almost next door. Gowda has something else in common with the global shopping behemoth’s founder Jeff Bezos: the credo of customer obsession. Except that for Gowda, it’s a skill he picked up from his days of selling used books on the pavements of MG Road. It feels appropriate that the stage for this journey from the footpath to the high street should be Bengaluru, the new Mecca for young entrepreneurs.Gowda, a slim, dark man with a moustache and the ready smile his customers associate with him, underplays his success, when he recounts it during a conversation in a corner of his new space. The vast new Blossom has the familiar row upon row of military green, slotted-angle racks full of books of the old store but also infinitely more space to root around, without having to bump elbows with the person browsing behind you. The warehouse-like ambience is somewhat at odds with the cosiness regulars associate with the original but it also means displays are better and one can actually find space to sit in the store and read.Mayi Gowda39 yearsEngineering graduateSon of farmers from a village near MysuruQuit a job in GE after 15 days to sell used booksBlossom Book HouseChurch Street, Bengaluru3,500 sq ft across three floors20% new books, 80% used books40-60% on used books, 20% on new booksRs45 lakh per month15%Recently opened his second store of 8,650 sq ftThe son of a farmer from Rangasamudra, a village 25 km from Mysuru, Gowda got the seventh rank during his diploma after school and wanted to do his engineering in Bengaluru. "But my father was poor. He gave me Rs 200 and told me he does not have any more money," Gowda recalls. When he arrived in the city, he moved in with friends from his village working in garment factories in the industrial hub of Peenya, found a job as in an automobile part firm where he would work from 10 pm to 6 am and enrolled for a BTech in electrical and electronic engineering from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering. But the long hours at night began taking a toll and his grades started sliding. He was also forced to move out and shift to a hostel run by the Adichunchanagiri mutt (matha) near the Majestic area. That’s where he encountered the second-hand book sellers peddling their wares from the footpath around Majestic (the area where the city’s main bus stand and railway station are located) and Avenue Road. He began by helping them out, then dropped out of college and began selling books on pavements next to MG Road. In two years, sales grew from Rs 300-400 a day to Rs 1,500 a day. "Business was going well. I got a boy from my village to help with the sales and went back to college," says Gowda, 39. He passed his final engineering exams with distinction and got a job with GE in 2001 as a trainee for Rs 8,000 a month. After 15 days, he quit."I wasn’t as interested in the job as selling books. And a lot of my customers had told me there was no organised bookstore for used books," he says. Though he was leaving the security net of a regular income, he mercifully did not have to deal with that familiar killjoy, family pressure, because his parents "did not know any better". On January 18, 2002 Gowda opened his first 200 sq ft space on Church Street, near Indian Coffee House. But with more customers dropping in and selling their books back to Blossom, he had to move, first to a 1,400 sq ft space in the same building and then to the 1,350 sq ft of the current location, the three floors of which the shop now occupies.Though the going was initially tough, with distributors not giving him the time of the day or a smaller discount than what they gave the more established players, business picked up. "We give 20% off on new books and 40-60% off on used books, depending on their condition. Customers can also sell their books back to us, for 50% of the price." Blossom now sees sales of an impressive Rs 45 lakh a month with profits in the range of 15%. The model of used books (80%) and popular new books (20%) has worked well for the store.Blossom (and Bookworm, down the road) seems to have succeeded where others failed by choosing to focus on used books. Amazon’s recent entry into the category is a reaffirmation of the business model. "The used books (category) expands the book selection for our customers, providing them access to different types of used books from verified sellers," an Amazon spokesperson said on email, about the decision to enter this space. Daily sales of new books have grown 20x in three years, making it the country’s largest book store "with millions of titles and over 9,400 sellers", the spokesperson added.But Amazon is not the only online retailer of used books. Four friends from Delhi University launched Pen and Parchment last November, with the aim of selling books online "differently". "For instance, when customers ordered Harry Potter , we would put in a Marauders Map with the book," says Shikha Kothiyal, 24, one of the cofounders. "Being graduates of English literature, all of us love books and know that it is not always convenient to go out and shop," she adds. The site also has a vintage collection for first editions and will soon have literary postcards as well. "Our books are priced at half of what the new copies would be selling at on Amazon," says Kothiyal. The venture, which was launched with the founders’ personal collections and a collective investment of Rs 1,40,000 sees average revenues of Rs 14,000 a month. "We are almost at break-even but there is very little scope for profit after factoring in all the costs," she says.BiblioFreaks, headquartered in Andhra Pradesh , hopes to turn the corner and become profitable next year. Launched by brothers Ganesh and Siva Sankar Reddy in July 2013, the site is dedicated to used novels. "We didn’t want to become a copy of other online retailers so we decided to focus on used books, which is also associated with recycling," says Siva Sankar Reddy. Most of the books are priced at Rs 99, to attract customers, and monthly revenues hover around Rs 40,000-50,000.The challenge is to cover shipping costs as well, since books are heavy. "We offered free shipping in the beginning but that was lossmaking. Now we charge by weight but it’s free for orders over Rs 999," says Reddy. Another Bengaluru-based used books marketplace, AbeRuk, has raised angel funding from Hong Kong’s Swastika Company, according to reports.But Blossom’s Gowda appears unfazed by the mounting competition, both online and offline. "Online stores are a good service for customers. But I don’t see it as a threat," he says. The only time Blossom was worried was in 2012-13 when sales began dipping "perhaps because of the discounts." But after one-anda-half months or so, revenue picked up again. The shipping charge by itself makes it a tough business for sellers, feels Gowda. He would know because Blossom too, had ventured online in 2006, even before the likes of Flipkart . "We used to do 10-15 orders a day, mostly rare books, but we finally closed that in 2014 because we couldn’t find people to manage it." He also denies that the new store opening was precipitated by competitor Bookworm’s recent expansion, on the same road. The second, larger branch became necessary, he says, because books were spilling out, all over the place in the other store and it was getting a little too crowded on weekends. Unlike the old store, the new one will stock school and college textbooks, merchandise, stationery and gifting options, though puritans might shudder at the thought. But the entrepreneur is pragmatic. "If we sell only books, we won’t recover our investment. Margins are higher in other categories," he says. There are also plans to host events like book-readings in the new space.Blossom has a loyal, steadily increasing customer base (and a Tumblr dedicated to it, called Overheard At Blossoms). The helpfulness of the staff in finding and sourcing what they want, including Gowda, is cited as one reason for people coming back. Others vary. Poornima Swami, a 23-year-old writer and dancer, says she prefers the store to a big chain, especially the fact that it sells used books. "I love the range, too, from pulp fiction to hardcore literary fiction and the eccentricity of how it’s all arranged," she says, pointing out that Arthur Miller has been stacked with the As, but not under plays.Resident Bengaluru writers Shashi Deshpande and Ramachandra Guha number among regulars. Deshpande says one reason she goes to Blossom is to replace old favourites that she has read to tatters. "Shops which sell used books have a certain magic about them... In shops like Blossom, though there is a certain order, there is a delightful sense of ‘higgledy-piggledyness’ which promises the unexpected." Historian Guha, too, is a self-avowed prolific buyer of used books and frequents both Blossom and Bookworm down the road, launched by Gowda’s acquaintance-turned-competitor. "I was passionate about used books from the time I was in college and when I became a professional historian, they became indispensable to my trade," says Guha. The theme of buying used books inspires Guha into sharing several entertaining anecdotes, from chancing upon a copy of a book by anthropologist Verrier Elwin gifted by former MP Margaret Alva’s father-in-law to his wife, with the inscription "From Joachim to Violet with best wishes on her birthday" to another time at Mumbai’s Flora Fountain, where he bought a book for a friend who liked science fiction, only to find that the friend had been gifted the very same copy 20 years ago.But the best anecdote is about Blossom, where Guha has a running account. Gowda once offered to sell Guha a first edition of an 8-volume work on Gandhi by DG Tendulkar, with rare photographs by Vithalbhai Zaveri. Guha replied that he already had a copy but Gowda had an ace up his sleeve: the copy he had was signed by both Tendulkar and Zaveri! Guha took the bait and offered to exchange his set for Gowda’s, paying a discounted price for the signed volume. But Gowda went one better and convinced Guha to inscribe his personal set, since he was a biographer of Gandhi. "A friend asked me why I sold my rare edition. But I replied that I got something rarer," Guha says with a laugh.