A Czech company has revolutionized the selling of secondhand books and is now expanding across Europe.
The Czech Republic remains a country with high reading rates, according to a recent survey conducted within the European Union in 2022: 65 percent of Czechs read anywhere between five to over ten books per year, while the average for the EU is just above 52 percent.
This perhaps explains why not only new books but also secondhand books are highly popular. This is partially due to historical reasons: When then-Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet Bloc from 1948 until the fall of communism in 1989, officials censored literature and publications, banning foreign books and literature seen as “countercultural.” During this period, secondhand bookstores, known as antikvariát in Czech, often served as spaces to find (often under the counter) books no longer published, or officially censored, as well as foreign editions providing an alternative to what the government deemed ideologically appropriate.
Another reason is the overlapping of two social changes: environmental awareness among younger generations, and the increased digitalization of commerce, particularly after the traumatic experience of the COVID-19 pandemic for both consumers and business owners.
The combination of those social and cultural changes might explain how a Czech secondhand bookstore, Knihobot, took Central Europe by storm. It is now expanding to Western Europe and becoming one of the most successful business innovation stories in the Czech Republic in recent years.