2021 is a truly amazing year! Things are a bit much, the brain is a bit messy.
Originally thought that the entertainment stars lined up to overturn the car, the noise is also counted, did not expect that soon the mode will switch to the Internet giant queue was punished, at the end of the year also dug out a corporate godfather, public opinion that noisy can be big, overturned the river.
But! Do you think that's the end of it? Non also! Just two days after the end of 2021, our century-old Zhonghua Bookstore appeared in the finale.
We know that last year' long-established restaurant brand Tianjin Dog ignored the bun was torn by netizens, which has led to the direct closure of the Beijing Wangfujing store, but we did not expect that if the literati who read the book were to tear it up, they would not show weakness. No, the Zhonghua Bookstore was forced to come out and apologize, what the hell is going on? What is the real cause of the matter? Today we're going to nag about it.
At noon on December 30, 2021, Zhonghua Bookstore, a long-established publisher founded in 1912, published an article entitled "Letter to Readers on the Annotations of the liang peilan collection > <" on its official WeChat public account, formally apologizing for the mistakes in the "Liang Peilan collection annotations", which caused heated discussion. The cause of the incident was that on the evening of December 29, an author signed Xu Ronghe published "I Have Never Seen Such a Brazen Book" on the public account "Thirty-Six Pi", making fierce criticism of the many errors in the "Annotations to the Liang Peilan Collection" published by the Zhonghua Book Company.
Less than 24 hours after the article was issued, the zhonghua bookstore's apology came out, and the response was very timely and sincere. Judging from the feedback in the comment area, most people have given an inclusive attitude to Zhonghua Bookstore's response this time, and it seems that they have obtained the understanding of the majority.
Zhonghua Bookstore also proposed remedies for readers, such as the option to exchange the goods or directly choose to refund. From the perspective of corporate public relations, Zhonghua Bookstore is obviously more professional than a big brand that refuses to respond to public opinion and adopts a pretending attitude to let the situation develop.
But then again, a glimpse of the whole leopard. Although the long-established Zhonghua Bookstore seems to have been forgiven, the problems behind it are worth pondering. It should be known that the "Liang Peilan Collection Annotations" is included in the classic "Basic Series of Chinese Classical Literature", which represents the industry authority and "façade" of the Zhonghua Bookstore. The number of errors in the book is staggering, and before Xu Ronghe, there was also an author named Chen Rujie, who also picked out dozens of errors, which shows how serious the problem is.
In fact, according to the situation reflected by more netizens, the chaos in the book publishing industry in recent years has been unbearable to look at, so what kind of big move has occurred behind this incident in the entire book industry chain?
The strategic planning sought-after combing down found that in recent years, the book and publication market has suffered at least the following major problems:
First of all, under the influence of the Internet age, users' reading habits are changing. More and more people are turning to mobile graphics and video content as their main source of information, rather than the book industry on which traditional knowledge seekers depend. That said, the reading market has shrunk dramatically. According to the open volume data, from January to March 2020, the domestic book retail market fell by 15.93% year-on-year, the online store channel increased by 3.02% year-on-year, the physical store channel fell by 54.79% year-on-year, and the total retail sales of physical bookstores in February 2020 fell by 86.36% compared with the same period last year. Another piece of data shows that during the pandemic, the number of people who read and the amount of time people read have actually increased. So it's clear that everyone's reading habits have quietly changed.
The second is the rampant piracy of books, selling books as paper and milk as water. On International Consumer Rights Day 315 in 2021, an investigative report focusing on the current state of pirated book sales was shocking. There are fewer and fewer genuine books, in fact, the books that can be bought at the list price of three folds or wanton discounts are pirated books, and all merchants, except for the publishing house's own stores, are almost all pirate booksellers. Bookstores now want to survive, and in fact, they mainly make money by selling pirated books. This is a true portrayal of the book industry.
Most consumers do not consider these books to be fakes, but only admit to their infringement. Therefore, there has long been little way to stop the expansion of pirated books, and for this part of the publisher, selling books is a profiteering industry.
Second, the e-book market is expanding rapidly. And these important carriers of e-books are some Internet platforms, such as WeChat reading, palm reading, Kindle, snail reading, iQiyi e-books, libraries, etc., and the profit model of some platforms itself is not relying on selling books, so the rise of this part of the online reading platform has brought a fatal impact to the traditional paper book market, making genuine books have no foothold in the market.
The fourth is the lack of professional talents. It is also in view of the above various reasons that the publishing profits of genuine books are meager, and it is difficult to support excellent authors, specialized translators and book publishers at high prices. Most of the people engaged in these jobs are part-time, which leads to a shortage of high-level talents, and it has become a de facto problem to ensure the quality of books.
According to Ms. Wu, an editor of a publishing house, the current 80 yuan per thousand words of the manuscript fee can not support a full-time translator, she herself has hardly met a translator who specializes in book translation, most of the book translation relies on university professors, foreign language students or pure enthusiasts to complete part-time, in some colleges and universities of foreign languages, translation can be counted as academic achievements. But more often than not, the hard and poor job of translation can only be sustained by the blood of the translator.
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Now the annual sales of the entire book market are only 100 billion, and even less than the annual revenue of a large listed company. And such a small market still has to support more than 500 publishing houses, thousands of publishing companies, tens of thousands of bookstores, and the poverty of this industry can be imagined.
In addition, the now popular book discount sales have become the unspoken rule of the industry. Of course, book discounts have also indirectly promoted the serious decline in the quality of books, writing books can not feed people, of course, there are fewer and fewer people who write books well, leaving some authors who write books, nothing more than doing the work of excerpting and editing, what to do with low originality? Software to change. Therefore, they are at most a writer, and the gap with writers is not small, even two unrelated professions.
A veteran bookseller once said, "Do you like to read these books you sell?" You don't read it for free, and you make readers pay to see it, is it possible? "In reality, this is the case, now the excellent authors do not write books, have turned to live Internet celebrities, engaged in the entertainment industry, the result has led to the popularization of book publishing, anyone can write books, anyone can publish books, can imagine, the books written in the end There is no one to read?
The whole industry has developed to this point, and we are always accustomed to criticizing and ridicule from the moral highest point, without thinking about the essence and reasons behind the problem, so how can it help to solve the problem? This may be the reason why the theme of strategic planning is born today! The book industry has actually experienced a major change that is rare in a hundred years, and people who are in the bureau either upgrade the system, adapt to changes in the technical environment, climb to the top of the industry, or can only choose to transform and change, after all, active escape is better than passive exit. I don't know what good suggestions you have for how to get out of the book publishing industry? Welcome to leave a message in the comment area.
Thank you for your company in this issue, pay attention to the strategic planning sought-after market, listen to insightful views, and understand the road of enterprise entrepreneurship. Fellow old irons, see you on the theme of the next issue!