China Daily Global Edition (USA)
More and better bookstores provided as efforts made to improve content
Despite witnessing a decline in the publishing industry, Thomas Brinkmann still decided to publish a series of travel guides with the Beijing Publishing Group, which formed a joint venture with the German national in 2014.
Brinkmann, managing director of the Mairdumont Group, which is headquartered in Germany, has visited Beijing frequently in the past four years and believes the capital still offers potential for book readers.
“When people are reading fewer books, it becomes more important to publish highquality works to attract them back to bookstores,” he said. “The need for books always exists. (For example) if you want to check the opening hours of the Eiffel Tower, you will probably find them online, but if you want to know more about it its history and stories ¬ you should read a book that is structured and integrated.”
Similar to Brinkmann and his company, the Beijing municipal government is working hard to attract readers back to bookstores, one of the measures taken to build the city as the nation’s cultural center.
The authorities have set aside 50 million yuan ($7.2 million) in subsidies for 151 bookstores to support their development, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Radio, Film and Television announced on Oct 29. In the past two years, 36 million yuan has been invested to help operations at 140 bookstores, according to the bureau.
A total of 80 new bookstores have been built in Beijing since 2016, and 11 of them are open 24 hours a day. By the end of the first half of this year, there were 1,011 bookstores and 29 book malls in the capital, occupying more than 1,000 square meters, according to the municipal government.
October Time Bookstore, founded by a team of seven young entrepreneurs who have just graduated from college, is one of the new outlets. It is located in Zhongguancun in Haidian district close to several universities.
Its founder, Fan Yingzhi, 22, said the aim is to build the store into an energetic and strong brand in both the reading and publishing sectors.
After graduating from Beijing Technology and Business University in the summer, Fan and his team began running the store with support from the Beijing Publishing Group, which offered them the initial capital.
The team invested 60,000 yuan and the company covered all the other expenses of about 1 million yuan, which included rent, decoration work and facilities. The team pays 10,000 yuan a month to the company as a management fee.
Fan said the store began to make a profit — 60,000 yuan — for the first time in April.
“For a bookstore occupying 100 square meters like ours, the profit was pretty satisfying,” he said. “The top profit in the market for a bookstore of such a size is about 100,000 yuan a month, and a large number of the stores are losing money.”
To attract readers and remain profitable, the team tries to make the store different from others by innovating and providing various services.
Coffee and food are available along with top-class tableware. The store is open roundthe-clock and offers a quiet environment for students to study or prepare at night for examinations. Customers need to reserve seats at night because of the limited space, Fan said.
“Thanks to the support from the government and BPG, we can work on what we are good at. We have plenty of plans for our store, and we aim to build it into a platform for readers and publishers and combine online and offline reading in the future.”
Qu Zhong, general manager of the Beijing Publishing Group, said it is a good way for the company to allow the young team to show its strength and talent by giving it a chance.
“This attempt has drawn wide public attention and good feedback, as the operations team is very innovative. It knows its target customers, who are also young people.”
According to a guideline from the bureau, building bookstores will be included in the national economic and social development plan, with support for companies and individuals who want to open stores in commercial centers, tourist areas, on busy streets and in new residential communities.
Zhang Su, deputy head of the bureau, said: “We are not just helping out the bookstores with financial problems. Our goal is to use these policies to attract more social capital into the bookstore industry and guide existing ones to upgrade their operations.”
Beijing plans to build 16 large-scale book malls — one in each district — and 200 niche bookstores in the city by 2020.
“The malls will become cultural experience centers for the public. They will not only sell books but also host lectures, charity activities and branding events,” Zhang said.
Writers supported
Beijing is not just providing more and better bookstores for the public, it is making great efforts to offer improved content and a better literary environment.
Last month, Du Feijin, a member of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Committee of the Communist Party of China, said at the opening ceremony of the third October Literature Month, “Creating the best work is at the writers’ core.”
In recent years, Beijing has supported authors by setting
Zhang Su,
deputy head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Radio, Film and Television up a special cultural fund to help them produce high-quality works, of which several have won national literature awards, Du said.
Based on this, the Beijing government plans to set up two more funds — the October Literature Fund and the Network Literature Development Fund — to guide and promote the integrated development of both serious and online literature, he added.
“Meanwhile, the municipal government is facilitating the strategic cooperation between Beijing’s cultural brand — October Literature — and the Alibaba Group, which will bring social and private investment into literary creation,” he said. “We’ve been working to keep Beijing’s literary world lively and fresh.”
In October 2016, the October Literature Academy was formed at Yongding, a park in the south of the city, and the first October Literature Month was held.
In October last year, when the second literature month was held, the authorities, together with the Beijing Publishing Group, many bookstores and related groups held dozens of events such as literary forums, lectures, poetry readings, meetings between writers and readers, and book shows, which attracted more than 500,000 people.
Online and offline activities involved more than 190 million people, according to the municipal government.
Dong Jinxian, 58, who is retired and who sometimes attends lectures at the October Literature Academy, said she did not go to college when she was young and never thought there would be a chance to meet with well-known writers and listen to them share their views on literature.
“My daughter took me there for the first time and we listened to a lecture titled Dream of the Red Chamber given by Li Jingze, vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers Association,” she said. “I love the stories in that book (written by Cao Xueqin), but I didn’t know there were so many interesting reading angles and anecdotes about it. The lecture was a fun and fruitful time for me. When I have the time, I like to spend it at the academy.”
The institute has held 11 lectures on world-level literary works given by wellknown writers or critics. It also stages various cultural activities.
Li said during a literary forum last month: “Literature is not just the writers’ world. It’s also a world for readers.
“Literature is not just about creation. It matters more about entering public life, the readers, the people, which will decide a nation’s future. Beijing, as capital of the country, has accumulated rich and precious experience on this.”
He added that the city is the cradle of China’s modern literature. The capital and the writers living in it have been leading the way in terms of China’s literary fashion, style and direction, he said. “Thus, Beijing has its responsibility to the nation’s literary development, which is destined to have a deep influence on the whole country.”
The malls will become cultural experience centers for the public.”