By CGTN's Hu Chao
Sunday marks World Reading Day. As online retailers have come to dominate the market, traditional bookshops have been on the decline. But a new way to open and run a physical bookstore or book café is on the rise in China: through crowd-funding. In recent years, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang and many other cities across the country have seen an increasing number of crowd-funded bookstores.
In 2015, a crowd-funded bookstore in Beijing named Zi Li Hang Jian collected over one million yuan (145,000 US dollars) in a single day after the crowd-funding project was initiated. And in Shenyang, a bookstore named Oxygen Bar collected enough investment to start business in less than a month. Another crowd-funding project in Changzhou attracted over 100 investors within just three days. Many are saying crowd-funding might be an effective way to help physical bookstores survive.
One store owner in Taiyuan, the capital of north China’s Shanxi Province, turned an underground parking lot into a bookshop. /CGTN Photo
In another such venture, which opened in February in Taiyuan, the capital of north China’s Shanxi Province, an underground parking lot is now a bookstore.
Owner Lu Hongren, a graduate at a local university, raised two million yuan - nearly 300,000 US dollars - in crowd-funding from over 100 people through the WeChat social networking app. Lu says crowd-funding is not just about raising money. More importantly, it has helped him get to know lots of people in cultural circles, which is important for his bookstore.
Lu Hongren designed the bookstore himself. /CGTN Photo
Unlike traditional bookstores, crowd-funded outlets often provide more than just hard-covers and paperbacks. Coffee, desserts and all kinds of cultural items are available, and customers can also take part in cultural activities there. Store owners believe that a greater sense of culture and diversity will ultimately bring in more customers.
The bookstore also sells flowers. /CGTN Photo
Lu’s bookstore covers 1,200 square meters and has over 20,000 volumes. Besides books, it also sells drinks and flowers, and has a reading club, lectures and a cultural salon, all of which are open to the public and free.
A variety of cultural events are often held in the bookstore. /CGTN Photo
Lu Hongren says his store has been making good profits, with a monthly turnover of up to 400,000 yuan (58,000 US dollars), half of it from book sales. And he is quite ambitious. He’s planning to open new stores in Xi’an and Xiamen this year.
His sales strategy is to offer discounts: Lu says that in order to compete with online bookstores, he offers the same discounts -- about 30 percent off on average -- as Dangdang.com or Jingdong.com, two popular Chinese online retailers.
The bookstore offers discounts and has been making good profits. /CGTN Photo
Lu’s bookstore is one of many crowd-funded bookstores that are rising in China. Some experts argue that bookstores shouldn’t be too commercialized, but Li Junhu, vice president of the Shanxi Writers Association, says the commercialization and diversity of running a physical bookstore will ultimately promote the development of similar ventures, attracting more people to read. And it will definitely help increase the cultural sense of society.
