> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.businessleague.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Adrian Bâtea (Cartepedia.ro): “Black Friday in Books is for readers who buy all year round: bigger discounts, free shipping or free books” - URL: https://blog.businessleague.com/adrian-batea-cartepedia-ro-black-friday-in-books-is-for-readers-who-buy-all-year-round-bigger-discounts-free-shipping-or-free-books/ - Published: 2026-11-02T09:18:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T10:12:09.000Z - Description: Cartepedia is celebrating 10 years with 2Performant. We sat down with Adrian Bâtea to talk about the book market and its readers, and about Cartepedia’s affiliate program, which has a huge amount of potential. - Author: Codruț Baciu - Tags: en *Splaiul Independentei from Regie brings back plenty of good memories, even in the rain.* *Last week, I came out of the metro at “Petrache Poenaru” station (which for me will always be “Semănătoarea”, since I lived for so long in the P13 dorm) to meet Adrian Bâtea. Adi is a jack-of-all-trades at Cartepedia.ro, which makes him one of the most experienced and knowledgeable people in our local book market.* *For a few years now, I’ve been part of this market myself, as an author, so I find it extremely useful to talk to people who really have something to say about books.* *Cartepedia.ro finished the previous round 26th in Start-Ups, with almost 500 sales. More than 100 affiliates contribute to Cartepedia’s program in BusinessLeague, but, as Adrian and I concluded by the end of our conversation, the store’s potential is much, much bigger.* ### **From the publishing group to distribution** Adrian has been working at Cartepedia for about five years. He came from the parent company, Grupul Editorial Art, which owns Cartepedia. Before that, he worked in publishing, not distribution. Today he holds many threads at once: marketplaces, warehouse, operations, distribution and, among them, the affiliate program in BusinessLeague. “I’m a multitasker,” he says, and over the course of our conversation it became clear that this explains a lot. When he moved to Cartepedia, everyone was waiting for the book market to recover after the pandemic. Instead, things got worse, then plateaued. Sales have dropped compared to ten years ago, and the team has shrunk under the pressure of costs. > We’re on a line that’s not going down, not going up, but look, we’re holding steady. ### **Relationships are built over time** Over the years, Cartepedia has greatly expanded its offering. Starting in 2020–2021, they tried to bring in everything available on the book market: new suppliers, new publishers. It wasn’t a quick or simple road. A relationship with a supplier is built over time, and both sides need sales to see whether the supplier’s niche actually sells. Meanwhile, Cartepedia has become, as Adrian puts it, “a firmly planted pawn” in the market, with satisfied suppliers and distributors. The hardest part is building your team. Once you have it (and ideally manage to keep it a good one), you can take the business forward on a steady line. ### **Readers aren’t made from one or two books a year** Loyal readers have been buying for years, in bookstores and online, but they have their limits too: you can’t ask them to buy non-stop. So publishers and distributors are always looking for new readers, through promotion, offers and discounts. But even those discounts have a threshold. > You can give discounts as much as you want, up to the limit of your own survival, but you won’t get past a certain threshold. The underlying problem is older than any campaign. For many families, books are no longer a necessity. Parents might make a compromise once or twice a year, “but a passion for reading doesn’t come from one or two books read a year.” The same goes for school libraries: if you don’t bring children there and build their love of books from an early age, the library “exists only on paper.” ### **What the state could do** Here, Adrian gets a bit firmer. He believes the state should consistently support children’s reading, with money for books that goes directly to them. He gives other countries as examples: in 2026, he says, Italy had programs totaling €1,000 per child for buying books, and Spain had €400 that went into the book market. > Here, a program like this for students kept getting postponed due to lack of budget. There’s no point in giving this year and then again in five years. That child has to always have the chance to buy books and keep up their love of reading, of learning. ### **Do you have to love books to sell them?** His answer is more nuanced than you’d expect. You need people on the team who know books and know which audience to take them to. But not everyone in the business necessarily has to love them, no. Sales people are more pragmatic, and that’s a good thing: a salesperson who has read a book too closely might end up telling a customer, “I’d recommend it, but if you have a younger child, you’d better get something else.” ### **The Big 3: school, Easter, Christmas** Book sales have their own rhythm. September is the month for textbooks and workbooks, a demand that can’t be postponed: kids need what they need for school. Textbooks are provided by the state, but they’re bought again when they get worn out, and workbooks are in demand especially for the younger grades. Then come the holidays, Christmas and Easter, when books become gifts again. ### **The affiliate program** The most candid part of our conversation was about affiliate marketing. Cartepedia has been in the 2Performant network (BusinessLeague) for 10 years, and Adrian admits openly that the program runs mostly on inertia. “We haven’t managed to build communication with affiliates.” But the products still sell, and Cartepedia appears among the top 25 stores in the BusinessLeague Start-Ups ranking. The real cause, Adrian believes, is the lack of a dedicated person. Changes in the team broke the chain, and without someone telling themselves daily or weekly “do this,” things no longer get done the way they should. I told him that books sell well in BusinessLeague: in September we had Book Month, with bookstores and book-focused affiliates in the spotlight. Our shared conclusion was that the relationship between a store and its affiliates needs to be cultivated. With minimal extra effort, the results would be disproportionately good. So we’ll be seeing Adi more often in our webinars: [See our calendar here](https://luma.com/2performant?ref=blog.businessleague.com) ### **Black Friday for books** Adrian talks about Black Friday optimistically, but without illusions. Cartepedia is a distributor: it buys books from suppliers at a negotiated discount and sells them on. “You can’t say you have one-leu books on Black Friday.” Black Friday for books is really for readers who buy all year round: slightly bigger discounts, free shipping or free books with the order. And the final math isn’t always cheerful. Sales grow by 50%, but free shipping and the extra discounts, mostly covered by the distributor, eat into the profit. “You realize you have 50% growth in sales, but actually minus 50% in money.” For Adrian, this is one more argument that the book market needs money for education and culture, not just campaigns. ### **Frankfurt 2028: relationships, not shelves** We also talked about the 2028 Frankfurt Book Fair, where Romania will be the guest of honour. An extraordinary thing, in our book-loving opinion. Will it help the market? > Definitely. It helps a lot, especially the publishers. They’ll be seen there and they’ll have something to bring back home, in translations. Relationships with international authors and distributors are made at fairs like this. If you want to bring an author to the country, that’s the place for the conversations that can convince them. His hope is that the organization will be left to the people who know what they’re doing. “If we just organize a fair with some posters and some shelves of books, unfortunately we’ve done nothing. We’re not putting on an exhibition. We’re simply looking for relationships.” ### **Books written with AI** Of course, we also touched on books written with the help of artificial intelligence. It doesn’t affect Cartepedia directly, Adrian believes. The big problem is for publishers, and Romanian authors, more and more of them, view the phenomenon with resentment (guilty!). For now, the Romanian book market isn’t attractive enough to make AI writing a business. Still, he hopes that in a few years things will be regulated, so that it’s clear what’s been written with AI. ### **What’s next** Publishers seem a bit more optimistic now, with their eyes on 2028\. Frankfurt could be a boost for every publisher to bring in new authors and new titles. But new titles also have to be sold, and everything is getting more expensive, books included. In the end, the costs reach the final customer. And when books aren’t a necessity, new readers are increasingly hard to find.