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Reading is an important source of cohesion and creativity for a country and a nation. Unesco adopted a resolution in 1995 proclaiming 23 April as World Book Day, a day on which countries around the world celebrate this culturally significant holiday in different ways. On the occasion of World Book Day, I hope that more readers will enhance their interest in reading, develop reading habits, improve their reading ability, and also look forward to more and more excellent books and provide them to the public in different ways.
Yan Jingming
One day last year, I was attending a tv show and a seminar and met an old friend of the publishing industry. He has long been a literary bestseller, often relying on a book to bring fire to a writer, and is a powerful role in the literary publishing industry.
Before the meeting, I greeted and chatted briefly, talking about what I had been busy with recently, but my friend was like opening the conversation box and couldn't put it away. Mainly lamenting the difficulty of the book market, in his eyes, writing books, publishing books, and distributing books have become increasingly difficult, especially literature. Of course, because we are all doing literature, he is bound to use literature as an example. In fact, all categories are similar.
The first is that paper books are severely squeezed by electronic reading. It is not that people don't read books now, but the way of reading has changed, new groups of people are more willing to read e-books, and many people who read paper books in the past have changed to e-reading. The hardest hit of this is the novel. Whether it is written well or not has no direct relationship with the size of the circulation. Sometimes it's not as good as the title of the book. And with the rapid development of WeChat and Douyin, even the chicken soup books for the soul can't stick to it. In the past, it was an urban white-collar worker and a successful person, telling a big truth with a small story, putting it together into a book and starting an inspirational book title. This kind of book is printed in hundreds of thousands of copies at the beginning. Now even 100,000 copies dare not be printed. And what defeated them was not a doctoral doctor, most of them were small-town youths, and these people used a short video of one and a half minutes to explain this "life truth" clearly. And just as inspirational, not yet pretending. Chicken soup for the soul is still like this, but what about fiction?
Besides, books are not easy to sell. Paper books are already strongly impacted by e-books, and the books published in this situation have to go through the test of the new order of the market. Due to the rise of e-commerce and online shopping, and because its discounts are often half-cutters, the advantages of physical bookstores are completely lost. Even if the physical store gets the book in half, it must add rent, personnel and other costs, and the 75% discount is the lowest, which is completely incomparable with online shopping. Indeed, there is such a situation, some people who are still willing to visit the bookstore, if they find a book that can be bought, they may also take a picture of the bookstore's book with their mobile phones and buy it online after returning home. Friends say that two years ago, the sales ratio of physical bookstores and online shopping was barely 30% to 70%, and now it is 10% to 90%.
The introduction of a friend also reminds me of the scene I saw in a famous bookstore in Beijing a month ago. The huge bookstore is divided into two floors, but the small number of readers in the store is really sad. At a glance, there are more salespeople than customers.
So, what is to be changed, who to change, and by whom? Calling on people to keep their promises, or do they quickly change their thinking? It's a really hard question. In the face of these practical difficulties, our consensus is that advocating reading is the right way. Our common wish is that readers can walk into bookstores and libraries, smell the fragrance of books to find their favorite good books, online shopping, electronic reading, not only can readers quickly and conveniently obtain reading materials, but also will not impact the market of physical bookstores in general. It's hard, but it can still be a beautiful vision.
Make every day a "reading day"
Qin Yi
▲ People dance the northern Shaanxi waist drum in front of the restored China's first Xinhua bookstore. Photo courtesy of Yan'an Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism
In recent years, with the continuous development of key reading activities such as "Book Society" and "Book Fragrance China", reading for the whole people has set off a boom in various parts of the mainland, which is inseparable from the promotion and promotion of the majority of libraries. The library is the main position of reading for the whole people, which not only creates a good atmosphere for the public to read good books and read well, but also guides the general public to actively read and develop good habits of reading.
▲ A corner of Xi'an Qujiang Book City, photo by Qin Yi
With the arrival of "World Book Day", libraries and other public service institutions have launched a series of reading promotion activities to bring the joy of reading, the joy of reading, and the beauty of learning to the masses. At the same time, libraries should continue to break through their own limitations, take the modern reading concept and technology as the guide, revolutionize the old and the new, and further improve the reading promotion services in the new era through the continuous efforts of the supply side, so that every day is a "reading day".
Entering a new era of reading for all, it is necessary to make the collection resources "live" and enter the cultural life of the masses with higher frequency and flexibility. The number and advantages and disadvantages of collection resources determine to a certain extent the degree of favor of readers for public libraries, and cultural institutions need to continuously enrich the collection resources according to the preferences of the masses. At the same time, it is necessary to more accurately dock the demand and improve the efficiency of resource utilization.
Entering a new era of reading for all, it is necessary to cultivate more and better reading spaces. Not only the vast number of libraries, but also public service agencies, government affairs halls and commercial places, but also take the initiative to allocate reading spaces. At the same time, a free drink area, a free WIFI area, a free sports area, a reading thinking area, etc., can be added to optimize the space function service in an all-round way, so that readers can enjoy high-quality reader services after entering the library, reading bookstore and various book corners.
Entering a new era of reading for all, we need to use technology to support the reading market. Under the background of the country's accelerated development of new infrastructure construction such as 5G networks, artificial intelligence, and big data centers, whether it is in the field of publishing or book circulation, we must seize the opportunity to increase the supply of e-books, audiobooks, and video books. At the same time, we should strengthen the construction of digital reading and let science and technology play a greater role in promoting reading for all.
Reading is not only about acquiring knowledge, it can also shape the human soul. In today's challenging and increasingly busy work, in a life full of temptations, in order to allow people to better immerse themselves in reading, so that reading becomes an indispensable part of life, libraries and other cultural institutions need to take the initiative and work together extensively, with more guidance, more channels, and better forms to help audiences develop reading habits.
The heavens and the earth are great, and Li Yuan is the first. To take the road of high-quality development, we must adhere to the people-centered development concept. Promoting the high-quality development of public cultural services means providing more distinctive, personalized and diversified public cultural services. It is hoped that more libraries, public cultural service institutions and social forces can work together to create and launch high-quality service content and measures to help the whole people establish and consolidate reading habits, so that the rich fragrance of books can fill the whole society, improve the cultural quality of the whole nation, and better accumulate China's strength.
Parent-child co-reading is the highest quality companionship
Contemplation
Spring is infinitely better, and it is time to read.
"Deeply promote reading for all." ——At the recently concluded National Two Sessions, "Reading for all" was written into the government work report for the ninth consecutive year. From "advocacy" to "in-depth advancement", the change of the word reflects that China is changing from "additional questions" to "mandatory questions" to create books for the whole people to read. The in-depth promotion of reading for all is inseparable from the joint efforts of the government, schools, cultural institutions and other parties, and the family, as the cell of society, promotes the construction of the book family is the basic project for in-depth promotion of reading for all.
With the implementation of the "double reduction" policy, the children have withdrawn from the previous state of being "divided" by various training courses and have more abundant and complete spare time. At this time, high-quality family education is particularly necessary for the growth of children. Many parents who rely heavily on training institutions and are accustomed to "throwing their hands in the cabinet" have become confused. After all, in an era of advocating high efficiency and specialization, it is as if handing over children to professionals and taking shortcuts to learning can alleviate the ubiquitous anxiety of becoming a talent. But education is far from being a competition for training institutions, but growing naturally. Parental companionship and family education are always indispensable to children.
"Parent-child co-reading is the highest quality companionship." Therefore, it is advisable to start with parents and children reading a book together, using books as a medium to immerse families in the fragrance of books, so that children can stimulate curiosity, cultivate interests, enhance learning, and cultivate a sense of morality through reading. These are the basic abilities related to the construction of children's spiritual world and future lifelong learning and sustainable growth, and they are also the lowest-cost and most rewarding education methods.
Many parents often complain about the intergenerational gap with their children and even neglect to communicate due to the lack of a common language. The rare time spent together as a family is often when one person holds an electronic device and is fascinated by each other. In this regard, parent-child co-reading is a good way to enter each other's hearts, promote parent-child dialogue, and harmonize family relations.
"All the adults in the world were once children, though, only a few remember." The child's inner world is pure and sincere, through reading a book, a story, sharing thoughts and understandings, we can often find that the child's spiritual world is richer and more acute than imagined, and there may be a familiar self there. Effective communication is not to blindly persuade children to "listen to their mother's words", but to understand each other, explore the road of growth together and move forward hand in hand. In this sense, good books are like beacons, lighting up each other and illuminating the way forward. In the process of parent-child co-reading, the child is not the only beneficiary, and the parents may gain more.
It has been 50 years since UNESCO called out to the world in 1972 to "Move towards a Reading Society". In the past 50 years, technological development has led to profound changes in the social structure, but the smell of books is still an irreplaceable spiritual enjoyment, and the love of reading, good reading, and good reading should also be the precious spiritual wealth left to children by our generation. Of course, promoting parent-child co-reading and building a scholarly family is not only the responsibility of parents and families, but also the active help of all parties in society. Actively promote the construction of public cultural services at the national level to expand the supply of high-quality cultural products at the market level, from the school level to incorporate parent-child reading into the curriculum system to the library to create a friendly parent-child reading environment - each doing its best, trickling into a river, and jointly creating a strong atmosphere of attaching importance to reading, facilitating reading, and opening books, soaking into every corner of society, so that "every family can smell the sound of books, and the fragrance of books wafts everywhere."
April 19, 2022 China Culture Daily
The 3rd edition featured a special report
"Smell the fragrance of books to find the good books you like",
"Let Every Day Be a "Reading Day"",
"Parent-child reading is the highest quality accompaniment"
Editor-in-charge: Chen Xiaoyue