http://www.gmw.cn/01ds/2007-08/01/content_648751.htm
More than 60% of academic book sales are carried out by privately run bookstores, and they largely determine whether academic books can survive. But at present, most of these bookstores are facing a survival crisis.
Privately Run Academic Bookstores and the Publishing of Academic Books Beset by Crises
Ye Zhi
The scope of the objects discussed in this article is limited to privately run academic bookstores in provincial capitals. For a long time, they have been the main force in academic book sales. The reason I am discussing the crisis of the privately run book trade together with the predicament of academic publishing is that more than 60% of academic book sales are handled by private enterprises, and they have to a large extent determined the chance of academic books surviving. The influence of most privately run academic bookstores in major cities exists to this day because of their outstanding professional specialization, the proprietor’s learning as embodied in the city’s elite culture, and their remarkable personal vitality. But at present, most of these bookstores are facing a survival crisis, and if they are left to drift, this will have an important impact on the homogenization of topics across the entire book publishing industry.
The crisis in the book industry has a long history, and runs counter to the dreams of those in the field.
Driven by the motive of making profit through publishing, more than 400 of the more than 500 publishing houses nationwide have entered the publication of teaching aids and supplementary materials. This is because the local lock-in and fragmentation of textbooks and teaching aids has prevented a situation in which a small number of suppliers monopolize the market. And because entering the teaching-aid field or other lucrative book publishing projects has led some publishing houses to feel that they themselves are entrusted with the duty of building academic culture, they are willing to publish and operate academic books at ever-increasing costs in manpower and material resources.
What I mean here by academic books does not refer to those popularized, mass-readings by Yu Dan and Yi Zhongtian, which everyone knows about, nor to those inspirational stories and historical stories that merely resemble academic books. What I mean is those books we may already have come into contact with at university or at other stages: books of pure politics, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, and some other fields, whose purpose is research and the exploration of truth, reality, and history.
Because academic books are expensive to publish and sell in small quantities, more and more publishing houses are no longer willing to operate them, and the crisis in academic book publishing has thus arisen.
Reader Numbers Are Sliding Straight Down
I remember that in the bookstore I once ran, there was such a regular customer. He was very young, yet he suffered from poliomyelitis; later he also developed bone cancer, and the part of his leg below the knee had to be amputated. He could only earn a meager income by doing bookkeeping for some small enterprises, supporting himself and his blind wife. But he was an enthusiast of Dunhuang studies, and often bought many books in that field. When he came to my bookstore, he rarely talked about his illness; he simply mentioned what he had recently been reading and what materials he lacked. The last time I saw him, he came to me asking to exchange an expensive book he had bought earlier for a newly arrived Dunhuang studies dictionary in the shop. Of course I agreed. I knew that for him, many ordinary joys that most people take for granted—exercise, hiking, and so on—were beyond reach, yet he possessed a spiritual pursuit that encouraged him to keep on living. He truly inspired reverence.
But can scenes like this still appear in our field of vision today?
Ten years ago, the important readership for academic books—college students—was probably much smaller in number than it is now, yet bookstores were still able to survive and even seemed to be thriving. Nowadays, it is no longer an isolated phenomenon for college students not to read seriously; entering university is not necessarily for the literal purpose of reading, serious reading cannot solve the increasingly severe employment difficulties, and reading is merely one of many entertainment activities. Against such a backdrop, the increase in the number of college students has not brought any substantive good news to the publishing of academic books.
In 2005, the reading rate among literate people in China was 48.7%. Among book readers in China, the average number of books read per person per year was 4.5; those who read fewer than 4 books a year accounted for 44.1%; and only 34.8% read more than 8 books a year. Compared with the results of the previous three surveys, the reading rates of both urban and rural residents showed a downward trend. Over the past six years, the national reading rate in China has continued to decline. The first survey in 1999 found the national reading rate (in the narrow sense, as below) to be 60.4%; in 2001 it was 54.2%; in 2003 it was 51.7%; and in 2005 it was 48.7%, falling below 50% for the first time, dropping another 3% from 2003, and 11.7% from 1999. I also suspect that this statistical data includes those who read magazines rather than books; in fact, when we are on business trips, traveling, or at home, we see even less of the scene of reading than before.
What does it mean that in a country of 1.3 billion people, a great country with 67.64 million people who have reached university level education (meaning junior college and above), the average sales of an ordinary academic book can actually not exceed 5,000 copies?
Privately Run Academic Bookstores Are Declining Day by Day
Today many people still vaguely remember that, starting in the late 1980s, many readers threw themselves into the book trade. In Guangzhou there was Borges Bookstore, whose owner Chen Dong was a man who followed his own path, had lofty academic ideals and attainments, and possessed a very profound understanding of academic and specialized books; there was an extremely pure academic bookstore on the second floor near Sun Yat-sen University, next to today’s Xueeryou Bookstore, whose owner Chen Ping’s favorite thing to do was to sneak in some leisure time among the piles of books and play classical guitar pieces when there were few readers. The Penguin Bookstore in Suzhou also became rapidly famous in the industry for its taste, and for a time was held up by many peers as a new and sharp force. Sanwei Bookstore in Beijing was an even more frequented haunt of celebrities and scholars. Earlier still there was the Shuren Bookstore in Fujian; the wave of mail-order sales that swept across the country started from it. Fujian Xiaofeng Bookstore, which had already been born in the late 1980s, stood out in cross-regional operations, and the young Xu Qiang quickly expanded its business boundaries to Zhejiang. Sisyphe Bookstore, located in Guizhou, originated in Shunyi and grew rapidly after entering Guiyang, becoming for a long time a benchmark in the local book industry; its team consciousness and corporate management were early leaders among all privately run bookstores.
But some of these once brilliant bookstores have one after another disappeared without a trace, and even the survivors are struggling step by step; good fortune is no longer with them.
In sharp contrast to the narrative deliberately promoted by certain media—that large book superstores are in their ascendant and bookstore chains are advancing rapidly—the increasingly obvious scene of decline among privately run academic bookstores is also reflected across the entire privately run book trade:
The most attention-grabbing feature of the Shenyang book market in 2006 was Dadongbei Culture City, which opened in August 2005 and called itself “Asia’s largest book and periodical market.” After operating for eight months, it ceased business, and more than 200 merchants were told to vacate within a week. The bleak ending of the privately run bookstores was described by some media as having “become quite like a small-to-midsize live-action pageant.” In fact, behind Culture City’s rapid closure lay the extreme distrust and pessimism of suppliers; this was merely a microcosm of the miserable plight of the privately run book trade’s collapse.
On October 24, 2006, Shenyang Dongyu Book Distribution Co., Ltd., which had long existed in name only, announced that because of continued operating losses and inability to continue business, it would cease operations as of November 1, 2006 and be liquidated according to law. The last surviving Hanwen Book City among Shenyang’s privately run bookstores was also said to be holding on with all its strength.
The Publishers’ Embarrassing “Debt-Collection Pressure”
In fact, the crisis did not begin in 2006; it was merely made more public in that year. People in the industry had long known that Xishu Chain Book Company had struggled for a long time yet still could not be brought back to life, and they also knew that signs of the collapse of Shanghai Six Thinking Book Co., Ltd. were already obvious long before the Beijing Six Thinking Bookstore opened. But people still deluded themselves, thinking perhaps that the collapse of large bookstores would take time and would not come crashing down all at once, would it?
When more than half of the suppliers, hearing the wind, began to cut off deliveries to bookstores rumored to be poorly run, those bookstores began to go into shock and then die. No privately run bookstore could survive such dire conditions.
What remains vivid in memory is that in the 1990s, Xishu Bookstore, which at the time had not yet obtained chain-operation rights, established hundreds of chain bookstores under a unified name in a very short time. These bookstores were spread across the country, many of them outside provincial capitals, and most of them had an academic flavor. But at the beginning of this century, the mass death of these chain stores, which had just yesterday seemed vibrant, had quietly and rapidly arrived. I once told the owner of Xishu Bookstore: you have built a vast and magnificent book edifice, but if you look carefully, every pillar and beam has problems; with the slightest stir of wind or grass, the whole building could collapse at any moment.
The later Six Thinking Book Co., Ltd. expanded rapidly in even less time, establishing large bookstores successively in Shanghai and Beijing, hoping to go public within three years by founding large bookstores. It was obvious that the investors were not only impatient for quick gains but also had very different expectations. After Century Publishing Group withdrew its shares from the bookstore, the bookstore’s credibility collapsed like an avalanche.
What, then, lies behind all this?
Suppliers felt that they had been enduring the torment of endlessly extended payment terms in silence for too long. Small and medium-sized publishing institutions could hardly overwhelm others through momentum, and after their books were distributed, the returns were impossible to predict. Large publishing groups began to adopt coercive measures of elimination and even the practice of prepayments and rebates before returns were made. As a result, some private enterprises had to divert large amounts of funds to deal with these big suppliers, and in turn the book payments owed to small and medium-sized suppliers were delayed even more: among suppliers, too, some rejoice and some grieve.
The Impact and Limitations of Online Bookstores
By the end of 2006, the best-run privately run academic bookstores found that the number of readers idly wandering in their shops had suddenly decreased. Not only that, many people came to bookstores not to buy books, but to browse, note down titles, and then purchase online. Although the giants among online bookstores are also not state-owned, for privately run academic bookstores online bookstores can more easily raise funds; if they do not make profits from selling books, they can make up the losses by operating other merchandise. They have established terrible yet ironclad rules—rules that no one can easily enter—and books, which can always be heavily discounted, have been tightly blocked by barriers from online sales, keeping out bookstores and other operators who also want to enter the online market.
This April I once asked the operator of a privately run company in a southern province—she was still considered a bookstore owner who ran things fairly well—what long-term countermeasures she had in response to the current development trend in the book trade. She said she wanted to make an online bookstore for her own province, but she knew that her biggest competitor was not large online bookstores such as Dangdang or Joyo, but her own traditional bookstore. The predicament she faced was this: if the online bookstore developed rapidly (and this still required sustained investment of considerable manpower and material resources), then her traditional bookstore would shrink even faster.
So why do we still need the existence of traditional bookstores? The display of books online can be infinite; as long as there is support from an infinitely large logistics warehouse, the problem is that a few large online bookstores still cannot meet readers’ diverse needs, unless we only need one way of shopping, unless we can tolerate the product recommendation method designated by a single seller. The most deadly limitation of online bookstores for academic books is their very late placement in the ranking order. Just as I saw in large book superstores, what is displayed most prominently in each section is popular books, and the difficult-to-surmount search rankings of online bookstores force people to seek the guidance of traditional bookstores. In traditional bookstores we can cross over, leap, and walk directly to our destination in content selection, seeing the rich scenery we want to see, but online bookstores cannot do this. Moreover, because it is difficult to find the best interpreters of content to present and recommend excellent books, and because of commercial pursuits, the personalized and specialized display of books is almost impossible.
Do Privately Run Book Enterprises Still Have a Way Out?
By today, do privately run academic bookstores still have a way out? I discussed the following questions with the operator of one of Beijing’s most famous privately run enterprises:
1. How many more years can privately run book enterprises that operate academic and relatively elegant books continue to survive?
His answer was that if they continue in the current way of operating books solely through physical stores, they may not even be able to last three years.
2. Then where is the way out for privately run bookstores?
Although his voice was still loud and it was hard to hear any sadness in it, this time he was utterly without his former confidence and composure. Clearly, he could not answer this question of mine.
The owner of another privately run bookstore, unique in both environment and operations, also faces this same problem. He has planned many excellent academic books, yet feels deeply anxious because sales in his own bookstore continue to decline. He wants to partially shift toward planning somewhat “lighter” reading material, but in this area others are clearly more distinctive than he is.
These two bookstores are benchmarks for China’s privately run academic bookstores. If they too have clearly seen that the unavoidable crisis has already arrived, then who can escape the fate that this crisis may bring?
Many people attribute the industry crisis to a lack of credit. Indeed, today, when the overall level of industry credibility has been improving, why is the credibility of the privately run book trade still so low? Why are book businesses unwilling to regulate their own behavior in operations? The reasons are nothing more than the influence of immediate interests and their outlook on the future—they have no confidence in facing the world ahead. Many of them have spent more than ten years dreaming of the industry, but now reality is mercilessly destroying their dreams.
Their relatively unregulated behavior has in fact also created many real obstacles to financing them, but perhaps this is the only way they can survive, wait for opportunities, and cope with the future?
The prosperity of privately run academic bookstores concerns the diversification and richness of the book industry, concerns our future reading, and even concerns the continuity and development of national culture. Their flourishing faces difficulties, but someone must still think about and imagine their future.
(The author is deputy general manager of Guangdong United Book Co., Ltd.)
////——The two benchmarks of China’s privately run academic bookstores? Guolinfeng has already fallen, and what remains is nothing more than Wansheng, Fengru Song, and Sanlian Taofen… Please, please don’t fall anymore…
Latest Comments
mist
2007-08-04 04:40:06 Anonymous 124.17.16.85 [Reply]
Books are too expensive~ If genuine books were only a little more expensive than pirated ones, then most readers would choose the genuine ones.
Perhaps in the future China can be like foreign countries, with bookstores equipped with printers. On the shelves there would be only one sample copy of each book; after choosing the book, the reader tells the owner what they want to buy, and then the owner connects the information to the publisher via the Internet, and the electronic information is sent back from there for immediate printing + binding into a book.
For ordinary books of 2–300 pages, the time required would be only a few minutes, and because middlemen and freight and other links are reduced, book prices could come down.
Gu Da
2007-08-04 09:41:14 http://epr.ycool.com/ [Reply]
Is that how it is overseas? … If that’s the case, I actually don’t like it very much.
Moreover, this way of doing things would not help privately run bookstores survive; on the contrary, it would be an even greater blow. Many of the academic books sold by privately run academic bookstores have a relatively more stable supply-and-demand relationship than bestsellers. Even if some books became cheaper, not more people would necessarily buy them. And privately run academic bookstores already sell with discounts; if book prices were lowered further, their already pitifully small profits would become even more worrying… Also, adding printers to bookstores like this would obviously benefit only those large comprehensive bookstores with deep pockets. Just imagine the Grass Bookstore and the Boya Hall Bookstore, which are already as tiny as snail shells, each having to put in a printer?! If we followed your strategy of promoting monopoly, privately run academic bookstores would probably all collapse immediately.
The reduction in the public’s reading volume nowadays is definitely not caused by rising book prices. Besides, compared with the increases in housing prices and general prices, book prices are still acceptable.
Pirated books are a threat to large comprehensive bookstores, but relatively speaking they are a smaller threat to privately run academic bookstores (though of course there is still some threat), because the more best-selling a book is, the more rampant the piracy. Those academic books that not many people were going to buy in the first place will inevitably attract less attention from pirates.
mist
2007-08-04 10:54:56 Anonymous 220.249.114.134 [Reply]
print on demand, POD, on-demand printing,
an emerging technology. Whether future bookstore operations will move in this direction, I don’t know either, but the prospects are enormous
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_on_demand
Gu Da
2007-08-04 14:20:40 http://epr.ycool.com/ [Reply]
This kind of print-on-demand seems able to support the publication of certain academic monographs with small demand, and if only one sample copy is displayed, it can also save bookstore space. But this is certainly unfavorable to privately run academic bookstores—because the places where it may be favorable to privately run academic bookstores are often also favorable to large comprehensive bookstores… Various development trends in the era of globalization all tilt toward monopolists… The emergence of new technologies always first benefits large corporate groups.
Ceiling
2007-08-05 22:29:59 [Reply]
Domestic book prices really, really are not high. The value of intellectual property is pitifully low; there’s no need to compare with foreign countries—just compare with Hong Kong and you’ll know how much of a bargain mainland readers have gotten.
Sanlian has already degenerated…..
Gu Da
2007-08-05 23:05:04 http://epr.ycool.com/ [reply]
Yes, on the mainland there are two reasons: first, book prices are low; second, there are few readers. Publishing academic books yields little profit, and this in turn means that many excellent foreign books have long remained unavailable because the copyright fees are too high……
Although Sanlian has already gone downhill, the Sanlian Taofen Bookstore is at least still passable. Of course, I haven’t been there in a long time。。。It’s fine to browse bookstores around Peking University.。
Happy birthday to Ceiling as well~
mist
2007-08-05 23:58:15 anonymous 124.17.16.85 [reply]
I actually don’t think book prices are low—just compare relative purchasing power and you’ll know; I lack the relevant data here
What is Ayi’s salary, roughly four or five thousand? Let’s say five thousand. If a book costs 20, then he could buy 250 books—but what percentage of Chinese people with a monthly income above five thousand does that amount to?
Also, according to official Guangdong statistics (regardless of whether there’s any fiddling involved), the 2006 annual net income per farmer was only around 5,000; source: http://www.southcn.com/news/gdnews/gdanounce/gg/200702260149.htm
Gu Chu
2007-08-06 00:37:40 http://epr.ycool.com/ [reply]
The demand for books is different from the demand for pork and instant noodles. The main group that originally buys books and reads books is the middle-to-upper strata. When housing prices rise, meat prices rise, and rice prices rise, the ones who suffer first are always the lowest strata. But when book prices rise, it’s different: it has little effect on the very bottom of society. Because even if books were incredibly cheap, the poor probably still wouldn’t spend much money on buying books. Of course, if poor people do have a need to read, that can still be satisfied through borrowing books and other means. As for those who regularly buy books—especially those who buy the academic books we are talking about—basically they are intellectuals, and however poor and shabby they may be, they are at least at middle-income or above. As for the farmer brothers you mentioned, even if academic works were priced as low as 1 yuan a copy, how many of them would actually buy and read them?
So I support book prices going up (I’m mainly referring to academic books; textbooks and supplementary teaching materials are another matter, and their prices should be lowered substantially). Although this has the greatest impact on me personally, it is beneficial rather than harmful with regard to the problem of the gap between rich and poor.
Gu Chu
2007-08-06 00:49:10 http://epr.ycool.com/ [reply]
According to the ready-made statistics in the above post, “each person reads an average of 4.5 books per year.” So, calculated at 20 yuan per book, if all of these books were bought with money and read, that would only be about 100 yuan. In other words, if a farmer has an annual income of around 5,000 yuan, then if he truly loves reading and also wants to read books he bought himself, his income level is more than enough to ensure that he reaches the average reading level of people across all strata. Not to mention that, quite obviously, the “gap between rich and poor” in annual reading volume data is probably far, far greater than the gap between rich and poor in income. If one calculates only academic monographs, the disparity is even more enormous. I may be able to read three or four academic books in a week, while a farmer with meager income may never in his whole life turn through three or four pages. Once books become more expensive, comparatively speaking, even if it is not exactly helping the poor, at least it is taking from the rich.
Chi Er
2007-08-08 10:42:23 anonymous 58.62.169.114 [reply]
The impact of online bookstores》》Sigh, in fact, how can buying books online compare with regularly going to the little bookstore you like, the one where you can always find good things? In a small shop, you can rummage around here and there, touch the books, look through them, and if you like them, buy them. You can also chat with the owner and see what new stock has recently come in. But because books bought online are cheap and convenient, and save time, they have unknowingly already taken up more than half of my book purchases. After reading the above, I can’t help feeling a little desolate, and I hope that the few private bookstores out there can find space to survive.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply