By Siddhi Jain New Delhi– Over the last year, the pandemic has led people to spend most of their time indoors as they maintain social distance. As India now reels under an alarming second wave, many parts of the country have tightened stay-at-home protocols — making consumers opt for activities that reduce their need to step out — a key pastime being ‘reading’. According to homegrown e-commerce platform Flipkart, the Books category has witnessed a growth of 1.5 times in the number of units sold in the first quarter of 2021, compared to the same period last year. “With people finding comfort in books, it’s curious to see how reading habits and genre preferences can change during unprecedented times. We pride ourselves in being close to consumers, while deeply understanding their needs and expectations across the country and work continuously towards providing them with the best selection, through our sellers. In the case of books, overall, two-third of the demand for books on the platform came from tier-2 and tier-3 cities in the past quarter, where we witnessed increasing searches from cities such as Jamshedpur, Azamgarh, Faizabad, Deoria, Guwahati, Gorakhpur and Bhubaneswar,” Nishant Gupta, Head — Beauty, General Merchandise, Home and Furniture, Flipkart told IANSlife.