"Cloth food, cola for life, do not have to make a long trip plan also."
This sentiment of life from the "Six Memories of Floating Life" was empathized by 40,000 people more than 200 years later. This qing dynasty Shen Fu's idle work became a "hit" on the Internet, and through the first season of "Duoduo Reading Month", it was reprinted and sold forty thousand copies several times in a month.
The thirst for knowledge is increasing, books are just needed by society, can Internet book selling achieve industry breakthroughs, join hands with the publishing industry, connect consumers, and achieve a positive cycle?
Books are good business
Are books a good business? The answer is yes.
As a highly standardized product, the book pricing is transparent, the variety of categories, and the consumer repurchase rate is high, which is very suitable for online sales, so it has become one of the earliest categories to be changed by the Internet. Amazon, Dangdang, Excellence Network and other Chinese and foreign e-commerce platforms, are based on selling books to start, Amazon is to sell books in the garage as the beginning, to all categories to expand, has become the world's largest e-commerce platform.
In the shareholder letter, Bezos mentioned four criteria for selecting a business: customer needs, a large scale, a high return on capital, and the ability to compete with time. As the food of the human spirit, books and reading undoubtedly meet these four standards.
But has the interaction between the book industry and the Internet reached harmony? The answer is uncertain. China's book industry chain mainly has four rings, content planning, printing and publishing, distribution, retail, with the enhancement of the right to speak on the retail e-commerce platform, the publishing industry adapts to the new form, becoming the need for survival and development.
After deducting 8%-12% royalties, 40% distribution channel sharing, 20% marketing, printing, typesetting and other costs, the profit left for publishers is indeed not much.
The publishing industry faces more difficulties than that. Affected by the epidemic and the "double reduction", the varieties of new books such as children's books and literature and art have decreased, and the sales of teaching materials and auxiliary categories have declined; for a long time, the book market has been sluggish, and it is due to the large number of high-quality products that have generated a large amount of inventory.
According to the survey report released by Beijing Openroll Beneficial Company, in the first quarter of 2022, the book retail market turned negative again, with a year-on-year growth rate of -13.28%. Online stores and physical stores have started unfavorably, and online stores have experienced negative growth for the first time, down 8.34% year-on-year; physical store channels have dropped by 29.7% year-on-year, almost returning to the level of the epidemic in 2020.
Readers are also crying bitterly.
The price of some books is called "high" even after discounting, and the price of dozens or hundreds of books is beyond the ability of many people to bear, and the quality of book content is uneven, and readers are confused about how to choose truly valuable books at a small trial and error cost.
At this time, the bland book industry is calling for a new business model to revitalize the entire market.
Get out of the dead loop
"Amazon is going to squeeze everybody out, they're predators, and we'd be better off without them." In the face of Amazon's strength, Randall White, CEO of the American publisher EDC, has said bluntly.
Because it is too suitable for selling online, books are seen as the flywheel business of e-commerce. From Dangdang, Amazon, JD.com to Taobao, now it is The turn of Pinduoduo.
In April this year, Pinduoduo increased official subsidies with a reading fund of 100 million yuan, expanded the scope of bibliographic subsidies, released tens of billions of subsidy channel resources, and joined hands with hundreds of domestic authoritative publishing houses and book publishing companies to set up an online special area of "Duoduo Reading Month" to subsidize the authentic classic hot books.
This is its third subsidy campaign after April 2021 and August 2021, and the latecomer who has cut agricultural products with "fruit" and 3C with iPhones has also made books his main focus. Can it get out of this dead cycle, which is known as "new e-commerce"?
If you dig deeper into why publishers are struggling under the Internet, not enough Internet and not excessive Internet may be the reason.
Once, everyone who relied on the Internet to sell books focused on the "low price", but for the book industry, the low price exchanged for the reduction of circulation links was actually only the first step towards the Internet - even the first step of low prices was not good, and Internet platforms not only wanted profits from cutting circulation links, but also asked publishers for profits.
Therefore, to get out of the dead cycle, the first step is to have a low price, not relying on the publisher to make profits, not relying on extending the account period, but relying on more accurate user reach, faster book circulation, from warehousing, marketing these links to low prices.
With 870 million annual active users, Pinduoduo, a unique shopping mechanism and strong social attributes, is more likely to explode. As the relevant person in charge of the Commercial Press said: "The way to play the purchase encourages users to participate in product promotion, the merchant will give the saved promotion cost to consumers, and the low price of the product itself can bring more traffic and exposure, so as to build an efficient cycle." ”
Pinduoduo continues to strengthen cooperation with authoritative publishing houses and book publishing companies, focusing on the concept of "affordable good books for all to read", continue to promote the development of the affordable genuine book market, benefit the reading of the whole people, and strengthen cooperation in the direction of public welfare.
Through the "More Reading Month" activity, more authoritative publishing houses have increased their official flags, their development has accelerated, consumer participation has increased, and the "knowledge inclusion" has accelerated.
As of press time, the official flagship store of the Commercial Press has nearly 90,000 books, and the official flagship store of Shanghai Century Publishing has reached 100,000+ pieces, and the two have also quickly accumulated tens of thousands of store fans. The person in charge of the Commercial Press said, "Through direct communication with upstream knowledge producers, the 'Duoduo Reading Month' broke down the information barriers between publishing houses and consumers, and brought preferential good books to consumers." The continuous holding and investment of reading month activities reflects the platform's emphasis and sincerity on the dissemination and promotion of high-quality knowledge, and plays a positive role in the development of the incremental market of the book industry. ”
The second step in selling books on the Internet, or deeper, is to improve the level of industry informatization.
The "2022-2028 Book Publishing Industry In-depth Research and Investment Strategy Consulting Report" shows that the book industry has a wide variety of products, a long sales cycle, and a low level of industry informatization, resulting in untimely transmission of information on book terminal sales, and it is difficult for book planning companies to quickly make market judgments and business decisions, which in turn affects operational efficiency.
A practitioner in the publishing industry analyzed that the problem of the book market is that there are too many and few fine products, and the growth of the number has approached or even exceeded the capacity of the market. "After the Spring Festival, the warehouses of many publishing houses should be nervously busy again, because a large number of new books have been transferred from the railway and highway for a long time and then left untouched, and even never packed and returned."
How to make publishing houses more smooth and fast to obtain the needs of terminal readers, how to make it easier for good books to come out with smaller marketing costs, has become the key to solving this problem. Pinduoduo's most important thing is traffic and understanding of users, so that publishers can obtain terminal market data faster and make adjustments accordingly.
The unique playing method of "More Reading Month" has catalyzed the new business model of the book industry, "printing many times in the middle, destocking, going to middlemen, and mass production, which can be regarded as the C2M prototype of the book industry", the person in charge of Tiandi Publishing House deconstructed the spelling model. Its "Six Notes of Floating Life" sold as many as 40,000 copies in one month of reading, becoming a huge success. During the second season of Duoduo Reading Month, popular books such as "Sir", "Night Sailing Ship" and "Selfish Gene" of CITIC Publishing House also tested the waters to open the pre-sale mechanism of C2M mode while waiting for replenishment of inventory and emergency printing after selling out.
Publishers get sales and user preferences, readers get parity and genuine, and Pinduoduo gets traffic and users, which is the positive cycle it wants to achieve.
Reading "The Second Spring"
Paper books are actually a big market, the 19th National Reading Survey shows that many indicators of national reading in 2021 have improved: in 2021, the average number of paper books read by adult citizens in mainland China is 4.76, higher than 4.7 in 2020, and the overall reading rate is 59.7%, an increase of 0.2% over 2020.
"Due to the large population base of the mainland, every 0.1 percentage point increase means that the overall growth is large." Some experts have analyzed it this way.
For China, which is becoming an economic power, every book that is not idle, every person who reads it, is part of a cultural power. Since 2014, "Reading for All" has been written into the government work report for 9 consecutive times, and this year's report points out that it is necessary to enrich the spiritual and cultural life of the people, cultivate and practice the core values of socialism, and deepen the creation of mass spiritual civilization.
However, due to factors such as the level of economic development, there is a huge "reading gap" between urban and rural areas on the mainland. According to the results of the 19th National Reading Survey, the book reading rate of urban residents on the mainland is 68.5%, which is much higher than the book reading rate of 50.0% of rural residents.
In fact, the society's thirst for books and knowledge is a kind of "just need", with the rapid development of the economy, the Chinese people's thirst for books and knowledge is rising, especially the sinking market.
The "2021 Duoduo Reading Report" launched by Pinduoduo reflects this, showing that during the two seasons of the "Duoduo Reading Month" activity, the book order volume and book transaction volume from rural areas increased by more than 154% year-on-year, the book order volume and book transaction volume from rural primary and secondary schools increased by more than 110% year-on-year, and the book order volume and book transaction volume from 160 national rural revitalization key help counties increased by more than 123%.
If you comb through the impact of the Internet industry on the book industry, in the first stage, under the leadership of Amazon and Dangdang, offline bookstores and book markets have been moved to the Internet, and in 2020, online store channels contributed 79% of China's total book retail sales. Although the Internet has made the world flat, this stage of Internet book sales has mainly benefited urban readers.
With the gradual deepening of Internet book sales, the sinking market has also become their target, and the new e-commerce platform represented by Pinduoduo is making up for this gap.
With the satisfaction of the reading needs of users in the sinking market, books are under the leadership of the Internet to glow the "second spring": twenty years of e-commerce construction, open up the network, express delivery, payment and other conditions of books to the sinking market; with the rise of townships, poverty alleviation, the sinking market has an economic foundation.
For a long time, under the dual structure of urban and rural areas, the downward trend of industrial products and the upward movement of agricultural products are the mainstream, with the importance of e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo to the sinking market, the upward trend of agricultural products has accelerated, the increase in farmers' incomes, the speed of rural prosperity is also accelerating, and the rise of cultural demand. Today, as books join the downward passage, Pinduoduo is using its own strength to bridge the knowledge gap between urban and rural areas.
Behind the "universal knowledge" is a new market for books and new opportunities.
epilogue
After being stirred up by the Internet for many years, the book industry is exploring new paths: upstream publishers have taken the initiative to embrace the Internet and digitalization, trying live broadcasting, online reading groups, etc.; the run-out bookstores have explored new retail models, some of which have opened up online and offline, some of which sell books and also sell coffee and cakes; Internet platforms are also looking for ways to cooperate with publishing houses and win-win results for multiple parties.
On the road of "universal knowledge" for all, it is true that only multi-party cooperation can make books and knowledge exude greater vitality.