In the past few days, the news of the closure of some physical bookstores has come one after another. For example, Shanghai's first speculative fiction store, The Lonely Island Bookstore, announced its closure in March, while the bookstore has only been open for one year. In addition, Wuhan Baicaoyuan Bookstore, Beijing Shengshiqing Bookstore, Shanghai Fudan Used Bookstore, Beijing Jagged Bookstore and other well-known physical bookstores will close their operations in 2021. The Internet celebrity chain bookstore Yan Ji also exposed business difficulties at the end of last year.
The unsatisfactory news of physical bookstores comes from time to time, and it can always cause public lamentations. There are also many ways to save physical bookstores: government subsidies, bookstores + coffee (milk tea, cultural creation, landscape), holding cultural salons, etc., and some people have proposed the method of limiting the price of books, that is, the next price on the Internet, to flatten the price difference between online stores and physical bookstores.
If you think about it, this is actually a very unique landscape. Few industries have been able to generate such significant sympathy, and society has almost done everything in its power to retain physical bookstores. This may be a cultural attachment that comes from the symbolization of the collective unconsciousness of the bookstore, which is a cultural symbol, and there should be a bookstore in the streets and alleys.
But if it is measured in the law of the market economy, it can also find the paradox. The sluggishness of physical bookstores comes from insufficient demand, that is, not so many people need to go to physical bookstores to buy books. And the consensus formed by society is that even if the demand is insufficient, it must create demand, and even form a kind of discipline for consumers in reverse: you should buy books. In a sales industry where pandering is the main stance, this is almost unimaginable.
Whether this is enough for the whole society to buy books in physical bookstores is still to be seen. However, this kind of cultural rendering of physical bookstores has actually carried a certain sad color, for example, in related reports, we can always see such words as "perseverance", "pressure" and "self-help".
In fact, when you think about it, what is the meaning of books? Is it the commodity itself, or is it the knowledge contained in it? Today's book consumption is not ideal, in fact, another way of thinking, does it mean that the way to obtain knowledge has become diversified?
Think about the past, any skill, knowledge acquisition, rely on the purchase of books. But today, there are online courses and videos, and there are a large number of various online articles, which are "dividing" the market demand for books.
Of course, a lot of complex, deep reading still has to be done in the book, which may be the result, but not necessarily the reason. For example, some professional tomes, because the consumer group is not large enough, there are only a small number of expensive paper publications, and the publishing institutions lack the motivation to be electronic. So the direction of the publishing industry should be to make this part of niche content electronic, or to encourage paper reading? This is well worth considering.
For example, today' major scientific research institutions are promoting database construction, and a large number of literature is online. This will definitely reduce the purchase of books, but consider whether this is a convenience or a barrier to access to knowledge.
From the common sense of the market economy, any commodity that wants to be sold must satisfy scarcity, that is, it is good enough and less. The problem with physical bookstores is also the same, the books sold must have considerable quality, and there is no other alternative, so fundamentally improving the quality from the supply side can really stimulate demand. If we abandon this level of detail and emphasize instead the broad line "to buy paper books", I am afraid that we will not be able to touch the essence of the problem.
For physical bookstores, there is no need to be too sad, and we should also get rid of idealized narratives. It is better to be precise in the goal, to save bookstores, is it to save these bookstores, or the publishing industry, or to enrich the social culture at a higher level? These different goals may derive different policy contexts. Understanding these questions, perhaps less pessimistic about the news related to those bookstores.
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Source: Bright Times Review
Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yongqun
Editor: Zhu Xiaofan, Chang Ying