Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, is one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world. A former government car garage and, earlier, a bomb shelter, its sales are satisfactory even though online stores offer huge discounts. Photo: Chu Guofei/CSSP

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Eleven provinces and cities were promoted to pursue green development by transformation and upgrading after the National Development and Reform Commission issued the Notice on Building a National-Level Demonstration Zone in the Yangtze River Economic Belt in May 2016. As pollution control strengthened, a group of paper mills were shut down or relocated. Xinhua News Agency reported that the number of paper mills in Fuyang, Zhejiang Province, had fallen from 460 in their heyday to 125 in 2017.

The demand for paper, however, is still there. During the opening four days of May 2018, 32 paper mills across the country announced price increases ranging from 100 yuan to 300 yuan per ton. By the end of 2016, ordinary offset paper had another rise between 5,000 yuan and 7,000 yuan per ton.

“Higher book prices in recent years are attributed to the increase in costs,” said Wang Xubin, editor-in-chief of Zhejiang People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, noting that paper accounts for 50 to 60 percent of the cost of a book. Apart from paper prices, the costs of logistics, royalties and labor are also on the rise.

Children’s books are a category with faster price increases. Wang said that children’s books have stricter requirements for paper and printing. For example, publishers must pay the painter, the writer and the scientific consultant of a scientific picture book. “Publishing houses need to protect innovative ideas. Authors’ creativity can only be safeguarded by giving them their deserved rewards,” he added.

Some academic books are costly. The Social Science Literature Publishing House recently published the “Achievement List of Chinese Think Tanks.” This 500-page academic report is priced at more than 400 yuan. The editor suggested that we need to dive into the causing circumstances when an argument arises that books are becoming more expensive. Usually, some academic reports only print a few hundred copies. In this case, the average cost of a single book will be higher, so the prices will increase correspondingly.

In fact, book price growth has been going on for many years. The results of the survey “The Pricing of New Books in the Chinese Book Retail Market” show that the index in 2012 was 52.42 yuan, and it exceeded 60 yuan in 2015. Many publishers believe that the latest price increase is fair and likely to continue.

Readers have the keenest nose for book prices. On hearing the rising prices, most internet users rebuked it. One of them posted that “as a college student, book prices have risen by a dozen or 20 yuan, which has put me in a more difficult position when buying books.” Another post said, “Rising book prices are said to expand the respect for knowledge. In fact, it is not conducive to the spread of knowledge. Fewer people will buy or read books if they have to spend more on them.”

In an article titled “Will Reading Set a Threshold for Income as Book Prices are Growing so Fast?” the author mentioned that the discrepancy of incomes has now formed a threshold for reading.

In 2018, the number of physical bookstores in China has been increasing. In major cities, bookstores like Sisyphe and PageOne have won incredible popularity. However, the bookstore sales displayed a negative growth in 2018, a 6.7 percent decline year-on-year in general. Online store sales continued to increase by as much as 24.7 percent, according to the data from OpenBook, a leading Chinese provider of data and information services for the book industry.
The same book’s price in online stores is often much lower than that in brick-and-mortar stores. What makes the discounts so huge? This is attributed to subsidies from online shopping platforms or the publishers.

“Upstream costs are rising while selling prices are falling; the publishing organizations’ chances to make a profit are getting smaller.” Wang, who has engaged in the industry for years, said that if online stores push the discount too low, publishers will have to raise pricing. He pointed out that the development of e-commerce these years has expanded the book market, and it has also made it easier for readers to purchase quality books from all over the country. The competition among online stores, however, is largely a price war.

For most publishers, a 50 percent-off discount is the bottom line for their survival. If the discount is too huge, publishing houses will suffer a loss every time they sell a copy.

The price war is not new to the industry. Back in 2010, the Publishers Association of China enacted the Rules for Fair Book Trade, the first regulation for book publication in the country. Of its clauses, books published within a year should have no discount in physical stores and no more than a 15 percent discount in online ones.

Nine years have passed, and this set of self-disciplinary rules has had little effect due to its lack of legal force. “High pricing, low discount” has become a headache for the book industry in the past decade.

The reasonable pricing adjustments caused by rising costs should be understood. Liu Binjie, former director of the State Press and Publication Administration and president of the China Publishing Association, said that higher book pricing invites the survival of the fittest in the new book market. At present, the Chinese publishing industry is begging for more excellent books and a smaller sector scale.

In the long run, a price war is not a good thing for readers, publishers, physical bookstores or e-commerce businesses. The persistent e-commerce price war hurts its own healthy development. In a bad publishing environment, publishers will find it harder to full-heartedly work on good books. Readers will be the victims when they can’t find good books as easily.
“In the past five years, bookstores, libraries and picture book exhibition centers have produced a collective public reading force, which has evolved into a basic structure in regard to public cultural services,” said Wang Zizhou, a professor from the Department of Information Management at Peking University. In the tides of national reading, books will never be absent.

 

This article was translated from Guangming Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)