Booktrade.info points to a lengthy piece in the Czech Business Weekly about Levne knihy, a discount bookseller and publisher with 37 stores to its name (11 of them in Prague) and now among the top 20 Czech publishers. Their model, to date, has been to keep prices of their books – which include classic Czech fiction, travel, children’s books and cookbooks – as cheap as possible by discounting, but as they move towards a more traditional retail concept, other retailers and publishers are watching out.
Founded and owned by the brother-sister team of Jan Maivald and Helena Simkova, Levne knihy, now operated by KMa, is slowly leaving the discount concept and starting to invest in attractive design and better service, said sales and marketing director Dana Ledvinova. One of the reasons is that the company is expanding into shopping malls, and owners require certain shopping standards to fit the mall’s concept and image, Ledvinova said. But with a looming increase in the value added tax in the Czech Republic as well as a marked increase in both the number of publishers and the number of books published, expansion and price-discounting may be heavily affected.