The first time I visited China in 1999, we visited Book City in Shanghai. It was the largest bookstore I’d seen—ever! Book City has about seven stories with elevators and escalators, and at each floor I waited in line to get on the next escalator.
It was that busy.
Bookstore owners in the US must dream of such traffic.
Most of the books were by Chinese authors and written in Chinese. One small segment on the fourth floor (I recall) carried books from the rest of the world and most were in English.
Since then, bookstores owned by private companies (not state owned) sprouted like mushrooms but today, as in the US, those brick and mortar bookstores may be struggling to survive.
The Independent in the UK says, “Hard times for traditional books as China’s digital publishing industry grows. Pity the poor paperback. The days of the traditional book in China are numbered, according to figures just released by the central government, it seems more and more people are now turning their attention to digital forms of publishing.”
And the Chinese are buying e-readers with a passion. Recently, hundreds lined up and some waited for days to buy an Apple iPad as you may witness in the embedded video.
Apple launches iPad in China
In fact, the market for e-readers is so hot in China, PC World reported in March, “The Amazon Kindle can now count itself among devices such as the iPhone being unofficially sold in bustling Chinese bazaars, marking the growing popularity of e-readers in China.… The Kindle 2 was on sale for US$380 and the DX for US$630.”
The Economic Times says, “In 2009, the number of e-books sold in China reached 3.82 million, and in the first half of 2010 amounted to over 20 percent of the world’s total.”
It you have never been to China, you should not be surprised.
China has had a thriving publishing industry for more than a thousand years and now more than 90% of the population is literate.
After all, the Chinese invented paper and the printing press.
Amazon.com is also selling books on-line in China but they have serious E-Commerce competition in China Dangdang Inc., a Beijing-based online book retailer that had 42% of the transactions in China in the third quarter this year, while Amazon only had a 19% share.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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