Next time you walk into your favourite bookstore, you will probably negotiate more than a few aisles, and realise that classics, fiction and biography sections have made way for toys, stationery and gadgets. You will then launch into some sort of treasure hunt before you find the book you want.

Bookstores are desperately revamping their layouts — so much so, barely a quarter of the store space is now dedicated to books.

Tata Group’s 15,000 sq ft Landmark bookstore in north-west Bangalore, for one, has no more than 4,000 sq ft reserved for books.

“This is a transition,” says Ashutosh Pandey, chief operating officer of Landmark, which runs 18 other ‘bookstores’ across India.

And it is not an isolated case.

Sapna Book House, with eight outlets across Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore, has transformed itself into a “family store,” to use the words of Nitin Shah, its MD. The chain now stocks everything from baby creams, prams, balloons and diapers to chocolates, watches and sun glasses.

But what’s driving this change?

Experts say just one in four customers walking in actually picks up a book. The rest go in for other products.

Among non-book products, the spotlight is clearly on kids.

“This is one segment that the online stores don’t have a huge focus on. In fact, 40% of our business comes from the kids section. Therefore, stocking up more toys and stationery is the need of the hour,” says one book retailer, requesting not to be named.

Stiff competition from online stores is another reason. As they offer huge discounts and wide variety, retailers have no choice but to de-risk, which manifests in the form of shift in focus away from books.

According to Krishna Motukuri, MD of e-commerce firm Tradus, on an average, about 15,000 books are ordered every day online.

It is a number no brick-and-mortar bookstore can match, say experts. In fact, with competition intensifying even online, cyberspace book retailers too are being forced to expand their product portfolios.

“We have already expanded to gadgets, home and kitchen appliances, watches, personal care and so on,” says Ravi Vora, VP - marketing, Flipkart.

Tablets and e-readers, too, are eating into the bookstores’ pie. For instance, publishing majors such as Penguin and Rupa are gearing up to digitise 800 and 200 titles, respectively, for the Indian bookworm.

Then, there are the organised library chains (which rent out books), which also affect bookstore sales, says D Ravi Kumar, assistant VP - business development, JustBooks, a library chain that boasts a membership of nearly 1 lakh at its 60 branches across India.

Bookstore chains are now gearing up to open more stores in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. But even here, no one is sure they would accord more than 25% of the space to books.