Everyone has the earliest reading experience from the beginning of childhood literacy, and the reading activities of millions of people from the grand perspective of cities, countries, and human beings will get another wonderful feeling. Recently, Fan Deng Reading and Shanghai Library (Shanghai Institute of Science and Technology Information) jointly researched and produced the "2022 Reading Trend Research Report", which provides a glimpse of contemporary reading trends from multiple perspectives.
Chinese spend 8 hours a week, ranking third in the world.
Chinese ranks third in the world in terms of reading time
The report shows that Chinese spend 8 hours a week reading, ranking third in the world after India and Thailand. Affected by the epidemic, Chinese generally reduced the time spent socializing outside the home and at home or alone, so 44% of Chinese increased the time spent reading paper books or audiobooks, and 17% of people read significantly, all higher than the world average. China is also moving towards a global publishing power and a reading power, with 440,000 books published in 2020, becoming the country with the largest number of books in the world.
Paper books, e-books, and audiobooks are in a juxtaposition
From 2014 to 2021, the term "reading for all" has been written into the government work report for 8 consecutive years. All parts of the country actively respond to the call of the state to promote "reading for all", launch the "reading for all" development plan according to local conditions, and hold various activities to provide development impetus for the in-depth promotion of reading throughout the country. Beijing, Shanghai and other municipalities directly under the central government, as well as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hubei, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia and other provinces and autonomous regions have successively launched policy documents related to reading.
Under the guidance of various policies and activities, in the Chinese market, paper books, e-books and audiobooks have shown a trend of going hand in hand. According to JD data, in 2020, the number of JD.com users who simultaneously purchased e-books, audiobooks and paper books increased by 40% compared with 2019. Affected by the epidemic, users' time at home has increased, and all kinds of reading time have also increased, 46.1% of users have increased the reading time of paper books, 59.6% of users have increased the reading time of e-books, and 58.8% of users have increased the time of listening to books. In JD.com's audio business, novels, humanities and social sciences and economic management content accounted for the highest proportion of turnover.
China's digital reading industry is booming
Digital reading has become an indispensable form of reading for the masses of the people
China's digital reading industry is booming, in 2020, the scale of China's digital reading industry reached 35.16 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 21.8%. The national digital reading user scale reached 494 million, an increase of 5.56% over 2019, with 9.1 e-book reading per capita and 6.3 audiobooks per capita. The per capita digital reading of e-books + audiobooks increased by 5.5% compared with 2019. Every day from 17:00 to 22:00 is the "evening peak" of reading. According to the data of Palm Reading Technology, in 2020, compared with 2019, the per capita digital reading time increased by 23.39%.
Digital reading has become an indispensable form of reading for the masses of the people, from 2010 to 2020, the reading performance of mainland adults, the comprehensive reading rate has always remained stable, slightly increased in ten years; the book reading rate has risen steadily, an increase of 7 percentage points in ten years; however, the performance of newspaper reading rate and periodical reading rate is extremely dismal, falling by 41.3% and 28.2% respectively in ten years, a decline of more than half. In the past decade, digital reading is a form of reading that we have to pay attention to, and the digital reading contact rate has developed rapidly from 32.8% in 2010 to 79.4% in 2020, an increase of 46.6 percentage points.
Newspaper reading rates and journal reading rates are declining
With the cultivation of digital reading habits, more and more users are willing to pay for high-quality content, and the willingness to pay is as high as 86.3%, of which the willingness to pay for online literature has reached 49.9%, the willingness to pay for high-quality content-derived film and television works is 37.9%, and the willingness to pay for animation works derived from high-quality content is 28.3%. In addition, film and television and animation works derived from high-quality content have attracted the most attention, with 60.2% and 45.1% of the attention, respectively.
Digital reading users are willing to pay
The impact of the pandemic on global reading habits
In addition, China's digital reading users show decentralized characteristics in age distribution, with a large age span, of which users aged 26-45 are the main force of digital reading, accounting for up to 60%, and the proportion of male users is slightly higher than that of female users.
From the perspective of geographical distribution, there are more digital reading users in East China and South China, accounting for nearly 60% of the total, and the northwest region has the fewest users, only 3.7%. In terms of the distribution of academic qualifications, the proportion of users with high school, junior high school or below is relatively high, 30.7% and 34.6% respectively.
The continuous improvement of the proportion of audio reading has prompted more and more mobile audio APP to be welcomed by customers, such as Fan Deng Reading APP, Uncle Kai Storytelling, Himalaya, Get, Dragonfly FM, Lychee FM, etc. Judging from the way adults choose to read audio, in recent years, the way of audio reading has become more diversified and digital than in the early years. In 2020, the proportion of adults who chose the mobile audio APP platform to listen to books was the highest, reaching 17.5%, and the smallest number of people chose audiobooks or voice readers.
The report also shows that the current Chinese digital reading industry presents four major trends, such as "audio reading continues to heat up, the market scale is developing rapidly", "IP adaptation has become the key, intensifying the competition in the digital reading market", "new media helps new reading, online and offline integration development", "closely follow the national strategic layout, explore the international market" and so on.
The knowledge payment industry is growing rapidly
In recent years, people have paid more attention to the acquisition and utilization of knowledge, and continuously improved the acceptance and recognition of knowledge payment. Knowledge payment refers to the process of using the information gap between information producers and consumers in the mobile Internet era to organize and package information into knowledge products or knowledge services, and sell it to consumers through the Internet. China's knowledge payment industry entered a stage of rapid development in 2017, and its growth rate reached 202% in 2018; after 2019, it entered a mature stage, the growth rate slowed down, and the market size exceeded 39 billion yuan in 2020, and the user scale exceeded 410 million people.
In 2020, the scale of china's knowledge payment users exceeded 410 million
The upstream of the knowledge payment industry is a provider of resources and technology, mainly including knowledge payment content providers, Internet technology service enterprises and online payment platforms; the middle stream is a knowledge payment platform operator, providing various types of knowledge payment platforms; the downstream is consumers, including large enterprises and terminal consumers.
Chinese knowledge paying users are generally balanced in terms of platform selection factors, and the proportion is evenly distributed. Among them, the three factors of knowledge payment platform content richness, knowledge payment product cost performance and knowledge payment platform reputation are the main factors considered by knowledge payment users.
China's knowledge paying groups are gradually infiltrating into third- and fourth-tier cities
In terms of platform selection, 48.7% of users preferred to obtain knowledge products through search and comprehensive platforms; followed by shopping APPS, and 41.9% of users purchased books through shopping APPS such as JD.com, Taobao, and Dangdang. On the one hand, knowledge paying users pay more attention to the richness of platform content and lack of clear demand for knowledge products; on the other hand, comprehensive platforms such as Baidu APP have much higher number of users than vertical platforms and have significant brand recognition advantages, so comprehensive platforms have more competitive advantages and are more favored by knowledge paying users.
Overall, in 2020, China's knowledge paying users are mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, and the scale of users in third- and fourth-tier cities is small. However, with the continuous growth of disposable income of residents in third- and fourth-tier cities on the mainland, the quality of the population continues to improve, people's demand for expanding personal knowledge is increasing, and the scale of knowledge paying users in third- and fourth-tier cities has a large room for growth.
Age distribution of paid knowledge creators
From the perspective of gender distribution, the majority of knowledge paid creators are women, with female creators accounting for 51.2% of the total number of creators in 2020. In addition, from the perspective of age distribution, the number of post-80s creators is the largest, accounting for 38.69%, followed by post-90s and post-70s, accounting for 25.25%. Overall, creators aged 30-50 are currently the main creative force in the knowledge payment industry, accounting for 89.19%.