NEW DELHI: At Big Book Bazar , they sell books by weight. Want to buy J K Rowling's wildly popular 'Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix' in hardback? That would be 924 gm. At the rate of Rs 200 per kilo, it works out to Rs 180. Or you could opt for Stieg Larsson's thriller, ' The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest ' which runs into 746 pages and weighs 490 gm. Price: Rs 100.

Call it a marketing gimmick. Or a sign of the times. But at Big Book Bazar, you don't look for the price on a book's back cover. Rather, you head for one of the four weighing machines strategically placed in different areas of the shop.

The books are neither categorised alphabetically nor by the name of authors or subjects. They are classified by their per kilo rates. For instance, all coffee-table books are pegged at Rs 200 per kg. Bestselling English novels and 'Dictionery' (sic) are available for the same rate. Imported children's novels and popular Hindi literature can be purchased for Rs 150 per kg. English fiction or non-fiction, a separate category of not-so-popular books, are sold for Rs 99 per kg. Most of them, shop owner Sushil Jain claims, are new books. File folders and notebooks are also hawked by weight.

"We have been selling books for about 35 years. Over the last few years, sales were down. So we hit upon this idea to attract more people. And it has been successful," says Jain of Big Book Bazar. On Sundays, he says, the shop gets about 5,000 footfalls. "On weekdays, it is about 1,000," he says. No wonder, the shop has CCTV too.

The bookshop advertises itself as the first of its kind globally. It is difficult to confirm or negate such claims. However, online reports show that such experiments have been carried out in Pune and Mumbai in exhibition-cum-sales. A Facebook page, Booksbyweight, talks about one such sale at a Worli warehouse. Jain too puts up temporary stalls outside various malls in the NCR.

A bunch of banners welcome you to BBB. The shop, set up early spring last year, stands next to Daryaganj's famous provider of intimate love solutions, Sablok Clinic. Roughly the size of a badminton court, BBB hardly resembles the bookstores of, say, Khan Market. The cheaper books are sloppily piled on large tables with tags of price per kg hanging about.

It's 4 o'çlock on a Tuesday evening and about 20 prospective customers mill about. Quite a few, including a couple of women in burqas, buy notebooks (Rs 70 per kg) for their kids. A copy of umpire Dickie Bird's autobiography weighing 322gm is unloaded for Rs 30. A group of students from a government school in New Ashok Nagar buy a kilo of notebooks. "Kitne copies chaddh gaye," one of them asks his friend. An elderly customer decides to buy the leaner Meg Cabot's 'All American Girl' (300gm, Rs 60) over Cecilia Ahern's 'Thanks for the Memories' (360gm, Rs 70) for his teenage daughter. Speaking to TOI, several buyers admit being attracted to the shop's USP. A student says he is not sure if he is getting a good deal but buys the notebooks anyway.

Jain doesn't offer a clear answer to a question on his revenue model. He claims the books published abroad are acquired in bulk by his agents in London and shipped in containers in India. "The books are not second-hand," he claims.

Anup Bambhi of Faqirchand bookstore says most of the books could be "remaindered" copies. A New York Times article says remaindered books are sold "at a fraction of their list price -- when they are no longer selling and publishers are desperate to get rid of them. When a publisher remainders a book, it takes a heavy loss, but at least it earns something and clears out valuable warehouse space." Some dog-eared books with torn back covers are on sale too. Jain, it seems, also peddles second-hand stuff.

In a country where books have been traditionally venerated, what does this new attitude to tomes indicate? Social commentator Santosh Desai doesn't read too much into the development. He thinks it is a marketing gimmick but also points out that "the idea of conflating weight with weightiness is not a new one." He adds: "The aura around 'moti kitaben' has always existed. Besides, art is sold in part by the square foot."