Text: Chen Meixi
Editor: Principal
At the end of April, book promotions on many e-commerce platforms came one after another, whether it was Xiaohongshu or Douban groups, there were book spelling posts and show book stickers floating everywhere.
A derivative question is, nearly 10 years after the book publishing industry was stamped as a sunset industry, are there really so many people still reading paper books?
On World Book Day, I decided to start from Wudaokou, the legendary center of the universe, and along Chengfu Road, to visit two well-known independent bookstores in Beijing to find answers about paper books and bookstores.
"It's okay to take it apart and not buy it"
The first stop is the Halloween Book Garden, which has a high status in the hearts of book lovers. After moving at the end of last year, Halloween Book Garden moved into the mall for the first time, and although it was still on the familiar Chengfu Road all the way south, on the third floor of the Wudaokou shopping center, its neighbors were turned into game arcades and doll retail stores.
Moving into a shopping mall has now become an important means for bookstores to maintain their operations. For shopping malls, bookstores can increase the cultural atmosphere and provide diversified service scenarios in addition to traditional catering, clothing, cinemas and other formats, so many shopping malls are willing to reduce the rent to introduce bookstores;
Previously, the chain commercial bookstore Sisyphus opened up a new model of bookstore operation in the symbiotic relationship with shopping malls across the country.
And Halloween is clearly more personal. Although it moved into the mall, Halloween still retains its original basic appearance, and all kinds of books are arranged in sequence on the bookshelves of "standing up to the sky" - not selling bestsellers, not selling successful learning, Wansholm continues to do business that refuses to be modeled in a space that pays attention to the most business-model.
On the bookshelf, the classification names are written with a brush, and there are gaps under the lack of ink where the pen strokes.
A corner of the Halloween Book Garden, handwritten book categories
Two cabinets of special books are placed in the corridor of the mall, unattended, and most of the customers who come and go will stop for a moment, accompanied by the dynamic dance machine next door, and flip through a few pages. An old man passing by seemed to have taken a fancy to Zhi'an's anthology, and after reading it repeatedly, he began to turn around and look at this month's book list displayed in the glass window.
Bookcases placed in the corridors of shopping malls
The best-selling list written on the blackboard in the bookstore is still preserved, and in a place where more people can see it, the book list conveys the understanding and love of reading to more people in another form. It's like another form of Window Shopping, except that the object becomes a figurative book.
A list of books facing the corridor of the mall
Almost all the customers passing by the mall will stop to take a look. Bookstores and life will be linked together in a more everyday way.
From the Wudaokou Shopping Center, where the Wansheng Book Garden is located, walk 1,500 meters north along Chengfu Road to another "elderly" Douban bookstore. Because of some kind of unified signboard plan, the Douban bookstore, sandwiched between a barber shop and a print shop, has been replaced with a neat and uniform signboard font. But as soon as you step through the narrow door, you can see the ingenuity of the caretaker everywhere.
The iron bookshelves are old, and I don't know what year the stamps are affixed next to the handwritten classification labels. Poetry occupies only a narrow shelf, with a note covered in rust, quoting a short poem by the American poet Carl Sandburg: "Poetry is an echo that invites the shadows to dance"
In the small Douban bookstore, there are similar small notes everywhere, pasted everywhere, most of them are handwritten, some indicate the book category, some are just a short poem, and some seem to be communicating with readers. On the small slip of paper, the two words that appear most often are "okay".
In a conspicuous place on the side of the bookshelf, a note reads: "Books with plastic seals can be removed, and it doesn't hurt to open them without buying them." The font size is obviously a few circles larger than the other notes, with the urgency of conveying the attitude of "no harm".
On the yellowed hard cardboard at the cash register, it was also written with a marker: "It's okay not to buy the premium book if you don't ask for a price!"
In the narrow aisles of the bookstore, customers are leaning on the shelves to read books, and the clerks are sorting out the books to be packed and sent, knowing each other's existence, but never disturbing each other, only briefly meeting at the cash register. Of course, if you don't buy anything, it's okay! It's rare in life to be reminded that "it's okay" frequently, but in a bookstore, it's okay to become a lot, as if killing time, not pointing to some specific result, and it's not a big deal.
It is a figurative appeasement, from the space full of books, the whispers between the writers, the buyers and the sellers of books across time and space.
Read specific books and love specific people
Paper books and bookstores still exist because there are still many readers who need to read "specific books".
Li Xiao, born in the 90s, prepared a special souvenir for her wedding last year - she and her husband each chose a book, put it in a canvas bag with the candy, and gave it to every relative and friend who attended the wedding.
She recalls that the idea was a flash of inspiration after the distress: "I read a lot of online souvenir matching tutorials, most of them were honey, towels, perfumes, etc., and I didn't feel that it was suitable for everyone. One night, playing with my phone, I swiped to Dangdang's flagship store in Pinduoduo, which contained a book I wanted to buy at a discount, and the price was very affordable, and then I thought, giving books should be a suitable gift for everyone. ”
In order to make the taste of the gift more "fair", Li Xiao and her husband decided to choose a favorite book each, each order 50 copies from Pinduoduo, and randomly stuff them into 100 canvas bags for guests before the wedding. Li Xinxin, her mother received a courier package of several boxes of books, and asked her suspiciously, "Are you going to change careers and open a bookstore?"
But wedding guests love this gift. Li Xiaoxuan's book is called "A Hundred Years of Good Harmony", which is a collection of short stories written by writer Jiang Meiyun, and the lives of 14 main female characters are involved with each other, completing a "Amateur Chronicle of the Republic of China". Li Xiaoxiao said with a smile: "The title of this book is very confusing, it seems extraordinarily festive, full of blessings for marriage and love, in fact, the story is not told like that at all, it is a little easter egg I left for my friends." ”
Li Xiao's husband chose nature writer John Muir's "Summer Walking Through the Mountains". After the wedding, a friend sent a photo of her plane flying over a mountain range while she was reading the book she received at the wedding. Li Xiao feels that this connection will last for a longer time: "Whether they opened it right away, put it on the bookshelf for a long time, or didn't read it for decades to come, we all have a common memory starting from these two books." ”
50 copies of "Summer Walking Through the Mountains" bought before the wedding last year, source interviewee
There are readers who use books to build collective memories, and there are readers who use books to get through the dilemmas of life that are only related to themselves.
In September 2021, Liu Suyi bought a kindle, but the convenience of e-reading did not defeat the reading habit he developed since childhood. He found that he didn't have the patience to finish reading on an electronic device, and there were many operations that could only be done by holding the book in his hand.
He likes the feeling of turning pages: "It's a wonderful feeling, the paper of each book is actually different, different papers, when you turn the pages around, you will have a different feel." Some books have very good and hard paper and are whitish in color, while some books have very soft paper and are miserable yellow in color. ”
In recent years, Liu Suyi has bought an average of more than 50 books a year, and some of the books he has read will be sold on second-hand book platforms, and the books he really likes will be collected at home. He likes to make circles on the pages of books with a pencil, and even make notes with a pencil, because he used to visit factories where many fish were caught, and saw the workers "wiping the paper" very hard, processing the traces left by the old owner. "When you go to sell second-hand books, others will clean them up better, so you use an eraser to erase the pencil, and you can't erase it with a marker. ”
Liu Suyi didn't understand why he could often see clips of the pages of "The Brothers Karamazov" on Xiaohongshu and Moments, and he even wondered if it was out of a "show-off mentality". Until he finished reading the book himself, he couldn't help but post a circle of friends.
Source: Interviewee
A few years ago, Luo Xiang's interpretation of "The Brothers Karamazov" once became a popular golden sentence, and the sentence "love concrete people, don't love abstract people" is a new life guide for many people. And when Liu Suyi returned to the context of the original text and read "I love human beings, but I am really puzzled by myself: the more I love the whole human race, the more I don't love specific people, that is, one by one", he still felt an indescribable shock.
There is no distinction between superior and inferior in reading
Before 2021, Liu Suyi felt that "reading literary novels is a waste of life". He likes to read for more direct answers, such as how the world works and what to know in the business world. It wasn't until his life began to face certain "untie knots" that he turned to reading classic literature and trying to find some kind of distant healing from it.
One afternoon in June 2022, Liu Suyi walked into a simple restaurant in a shopping mall with "The Brothers Karamazov", and when he went, it was just after lunch, and there were no customers in the restaurant. By the time Liu Su raised his head again and again, returning to the mall on the edge of Beijing's East Second Ring Road from the distant story of killing his father, the sun had already set, and he was surrounded by guests who had come to dinner.
Make a book full of annotations, source interviewees
He draws healing from this immersion. "I didn't realize that time was flowing. The deeper and bigger the confusion encountered, the more there is a need for that kind of tome. On the one hand, it seems that it can suppress its restless heart, and it does give some answers and guidance, and it has an inexplicable healing feeling. ”
But he doesn't think there is any superiority or disadvantage in reading, and he doesn't think there is a chain of contempt for reading. Reading a large number of literary works can heal him, reading social science classics can give him direct knowledge, and reading business biographies can also give him a smooth experience and empathy. At the end of last year, he had just finished reading "Musk's Biography" and recommended "Chip Wars" to me, calling it "a smoothly translated primer book".
Li Xiaoye said that although she loves to read literary works herself, she will not interfere with her parents' reading preferences. When she was a child, her father loved to go to the town library to borrow Jin Yong and Gu Long's novels, and now she loves to read a series of online articles about "Special Forces King", so she simply bought a tablet computer to let her father see more clearly.
Li's mother's demand for books is mainly focused on flower raising, knitting styles, and cross-stitch teaching. When she was a child, there were two yellowed needle books at home, and most of her childhood sweater styles came from here. After her mother retired, she bought "Cross Stitch Books" and basic materials from the Internet, so that her mother could find her hobby again.
The demand for specific books has finally become the reason why paper books can still survive in the age of e-reading.
According to the 21st National Reading Survey recently released by the China Academy of Press and Publication, the per capita reading volume of paper books among mainland adults in 2023 will be 4.75, basically the same as the previous year, and the average number of books read by minors will be 11.39 books per day for more than half an hour, an increase of 0.25 books compared with 2022.
Every year, around the National Reading Day, major online book buying platforms will launch promotional activities, and gradually, at the end of April and early May, it has become the "Double Eleven" of books.
This year, in addition to the literature and social science books promoted in previous quarters, Pinduoduo has also increased subsidies for functional and practical books to benefit a wider range of reading lovers. For example, "580 Fresh Flowers and Plants Embroidery" that Li's mother may be interested in, and all kinds of teaching aids necessary for graduate students, the variety of books has increased from more than 1,000 to tens of thousands.
The person in charge of the store of Shanghai Century Publishing Group, who participated in the five Duoduo Reading Month activities, said: "The two seasons of reading month are the peak sales period of the store every year. Books such as "The Brothers Karamazov", "Immersion", "Dictionary of Tang Poetry Appreciation", "Three Hundred Years of the Civil War", and "Re-Walking: Searching for the Southwest Associated University on Roads, Rivers and Post Roads" sold more than 5,000 copies during the last reading month. ”
In the new season's spring book list, Li Xiao bought 50 copies of "Summer Through the Mountains" for the wedding last year, and the Mao Dun Literature Award-winning work "Flowers", which was re-sold last year due to the hit TV series.
Reading a lot of books in the spring of the month, the source network
The significance of National Reading Day is to make reading accessible to the whole people, so that reading is no longer a hobby for a few, but a life for the majority. Bookshelves in shopping mall corridors, books in wedding gifts for young people, and e-commerce platforms are all part of this process.
Books only make sense when they are picked up. It doesn't matter if it's "The Brothers Karamazov", or "Electrician's How-To Guide", or "A Growing Book for Children". What ringed in my ears was the sentence that I don't know when it started to be posted in Douban Bookstore: "It's okay." ”
(Li Xiao and Liu Suyi are pseudonyms in the article.) Unless otherwise noted, the pictures were taken by the author. ）