Learn Chinese online - Publishers should brave the new world

Opinion / You Nuo

Publishers should brave the new world
By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-04-24 05:29

I woke up yesterday morning to hear from the radio it was World Book and
Copyright Day. I thought to myself: What's the point? Are people supposed
to read and buy books on this particular day that falls every Sunday
before May Day just like consumers buying and sending each other gifts of
expensive moon cakes on Mid-Autumn Day, for instance?

I was right to be suspicious of yet another day of supposedly
international celebration being imposed upon us; the radio news bulletin
was followed by a long torrent of bookstore commercials. It seemed every
major bookstore in town was offering a discount of 10 to 20 per cent.

Competition, though sometimes not acknowledged in a straightforward way,
is a good thing after all. For it is common knowledge that whenever a
sales campaign begins, it betrays a building pressure felt by its
instigators.

What else can you expect from an industry which sees many old publishing
houses hanging on to piles of unsold inventory from the era of the
planned economy?

Many companies will have to learn soon enough, like their State-sector
counterparts in other industries, to race against not just one another,
but to tackle unprecedented rivalry from competitors from the private
sector and from overseas. The Chinese market is already officially open
to foreign distributors.

A recently published research paper shows that the Chinese publishing
industry is much larger than other industries in the media sector. With
total sales of 115.5 billion yuan (US$14 billion), books made up 36 per
cent of China's media revenue except for that of the Internet, according
to researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

But like elsewhere in the market, not all competitors choose the winner's
way. In a market that is still in the process of opening up, competition
can be tricky. And the "healthy development" of an industry, a phrase
that pops up in every debate in the Chinese press, can be difficult.

Sometimes the tactics used can be wrong. For instance, the promotional
media generated for the so-called World Book and Copyright Day included
some alleged experts (whose names didn't ring a bell with me) being
quoted as saying that only by reading the printed book, rather than
reading online, can one really digest the thinking part of it.

In other words, you probably won't achieve much in keeping your brain
sharp by spending so many hours reading and surfing on the Internet. This
is nonsense. It seems to indicate that these "experts" have no idea just
how many successful writers keep blogs, and that the Internet plays host
to lively debates on everything from politics to literature.

Needless to say such sales talk reveals the fear of an old industry,
which has never learned much about competition, being challenged by a new
and more interesting rival.

The fact is, according to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, the population has shown a continuous declining interest in
reading (that is, reading printed material).

Of China's literate population, the percentage of those who claimed to
have read at least one book went down from 60.4 per cent in 1999 to 54.2
per cent in 2001, followed by 51.7 per cent in 2003, and then 48.7 per
cent in 2005.

In contrast, figures for those opting to read online have increased from
3.7 per cent in 1999 to 18.3 per cent in 2003, and then to 27.8 per cent
in 2005 when the nation's population of Internet users exceeded 100
million.

What the publishing industry should do is reorganize their business and
expand into the online medium, rather than waging a fruitless war against
it.

Plenty of bitter lessons about refusing to recognize the future of a new
mode of communication can be found in the many books published on
business management. Perhaps it is time for the publishers of these books
to read, and seriously digest, the thinking of what they have published.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/24/2006 page4)

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