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Loss of serious reading feared as Chinese use devices for games, films
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CHINESE Internet users have been mourning the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the literary titan and Nobel laureate, by lighting candles on social networking sites and reciting the opening of his famous “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
But in a country where more than 600 million people have access to the Internet, it is hard to say how many netizens truly worshipped Garcia Marquez, who died on April 17, by reading his printed books.
Perhaps it is also the case for William Shakespeare, another literary giant revered by the Chinese but very few are willing to read his works.
According to a survey published by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication (CAPP), Chinese people read 4.77 books per capita in 2013, 0.38 more than the previous year but still far fewer than those in major developed countries.
Sharmistha Mohapatra, a Shanghai-based Indian expatriate, wrote an article about the Chinese people’s lack of reading habit, saying he was worried about young people’s obsession with social networking.
The Indian engineer says he found on a flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai that very few of the people who had iPads were reading books, most of them were playing games or watching movies.
Worse still, many book lovers don’t buy books anymore.
Recently, Law of Gravitation, an independent bookstore in Zhongshan City in southern China’s Guangdong Province, held an “open all night” event before its planned closure by the end of this month due to rising rental fees.
“Reading is our highest belief and we believe reading will never die,” says general manager Liao Jianbo on Weibo, China’s most popular microblog.
The planned closure is part of a nationwide trend in which many bookstores have disappeared. In southwestern China’s Chongqing, 301 bookstores closed their doors between 2009 and 2012.
Book lovers have been wooed by new forms of entertainment and online retailers like Dangdang.com and JD.com, which sell books at discounted prices.
Kevin Guo, a Chinese student who now studies in Kyoto, Japan, says that reading pocket books is very common for Japan’s commuters, a stark contrast from what he saw in China’s big cities, where subway passengers are continually checking on updates of Weibo or WeChat, another popular social networking service.
However, at street corners and airport terminals, people are still buying best-sellers — from Steve Jobs’ biography to Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” says publisher Lu Guojun.
According to Lu, child-rearing manuals, cookbooks, health and fitness guides as well as teaching materials are also gaining popularity in China’s book market.
Though some experts have warned that Chinese people’s reading habits will be further shattered by fragmented shallow content, some people see a chance to remodel reading culture.
Former journalist-turned-product manager Zuo Zhijian started MZ Read, a reading application run on iOS and Google’s Android platforms. It tries to bring readers together by offering them a social networking platform solely focused on reading serious content.
According to Zuo, his team has received several million yuan from investors, a sign that “in a world of information overload, to know what readers really want is the key for further development.”
Wei Yushan, who heads CAPP research, says Chinese people spend more time reading digital content on smartphones, tablets and e-readers. “Convenient access to digital content is the primary reason that Chinese people read on their phones and electronic devices,” said Wei.
Digital content competition
The market is not short of competitors. Duokan.com and Douban.com, two major e-book service providers in China, both offer content on iOS and Android platforms as well as on Amazon’s Kindle device.
Before the online sales company brought its Kindle to China, many Chinese customers were able to buy the device from overseas via e-commerce platform Taobao. Because of the prevalence of pirated e-books, many analysts expected Amazon to incur heavy losses.
However, Amazon announced earlier this year that its Kindle business started making profits in China.
Kurt Beidler, head of Amazon’s Kindle Content Unit in China, says at a press conference in January that Amazon and publishers would work together to expand the e-book market and win people over from online games, web browsing and online chatting.
Still, many people do prefer reading, including the country’s leaders. President Xi Jinping said reading was part of his life in an interview with Russian media, adding he read and clearly remembered the plots of Russian writers’ works, including Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev.
In a government report at the National People’s Congress in March, Premier Li Keqiang also vowed to motivate people to read.
One beneficiary is Sanlian Taofen Bookstore, whose 24-hour trial since April 8 has been so successful that its manager Fan Xi’an said they received unexpected customer flow.
Fan also says that the 24-hour initiative was supported by a government subsidy scheme from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Film and Television and the Ministry of Finance.
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