More bookstores to run 24 hours in Beijing

BEIJING (China Daily) — Eleven bookstores in Beijing will stay open overnight this summer, offering cool refuge and knowledge to readers who are off work or together with family.

On Thursday, the Xiangshan Xinhua Bookstore unveiled the Summer Reading Nights series of events including a reading performance as well as a mini session on nature at the store.

This month, the city’s 11 24-hour bookstores are inviting writers and professionals to talk about a wide range of topics on nature at night. Some of the bookstores will offer 24-hour art/illustration exhibitions to readers for free.

“It’s also a chance to declare the existence of those 24-hour bookstores in Beijing. Now, more than 10 of them are there to promote the habit of reading and offer more cultural services to readers,” said Wang Yijun, an official with Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Publication, Film, Radio and Television, which oversees the Beijing Reading Festival project.

In mid-July, the Beijing government announced new incentives for bookstores in which 50 million yuan would be used to support more than 150 bookstores for their management and organization of cultural events.

The new incentives are expected to help more bookstores that have longer business hours, more culturally creative products and locations neighboring residential communities thrive in the city.

Some of the 24-hour bookstores are October Time in the Zhongguancun area, China Bookstore, which is known for its collection of ancient books and secondhand books, at Yanchi Building in the Di’anmen area and SDX Joint Bookstore, which has a collection of 15,000 titles among nightlife hubs, in the Sanlitun area.