Punjabi books are sold at a small number of shops in Ludhiana, Amritsar, Jalandhar, Patiala and Chandigarh, at book fairs, at literary events, and increasingly online.
The Punjabi Sahit Akademi at Ludhiana, the Punjabi Bhawan there, and the annual book fairs are the main physical points of sale for serious Punjabi writing.
Print runs are in the hundreds. A Punjabi poetry collection selling a thousand copies is a success.
Religious publishing is much larger: gutkas, nitnem volumes, sakhi collections, calendars and jantris are printed in very large numbers and sold at gurdwaras and shrines, and that trade dwarfs literary publishing.
Textbooks are the other large category and are a state procurement matter.
The commercial Punjabi book, bought by a reader for pleasure, is a small business and has been shrinking, while the language's audience for music and video has grown enormously.
The Punjabi Bhawan at Ludhiana holds the Sahit Akademi's library and its meetings and is the closest thing Punjabi letters has to a permanent institution outside the universities.
Distribution is the weak point. A book published in Ludhiana is hard to buy in Bathinda and close to impossible to buy abroad except through a handful of online sellers.
Punjabi publishing in Shahmukhi at Lahore is a separate world with its own presses and its own shortages, and books rarely cross between the two scripts.