By Li Yun
According to OpenBook, online bookselling continues to grow in China, in 2018 at a rate of 24.7 percent.The online sales totaled 57.3 billion yuan (US$79.1 billion). The online bookstores in China represented by Jingdong Book, Dangdang and Tmall Book continued to grow their market share rapidly in 2018, with a growth rate of more than 20%, although it showed a mild slowdown.
The giants in the online retail market
Online book retailers, while cooperating with publishing houses to promote the sale of print books, have attempted to accelerate the sale of e-books and built a mobile library for the vast number of consumers.
Tmall Book, one of channels on Tmall, Alibaba's e-commerce platforms，which focused on book sales, has risen rapidly in recent years and successfully entered the top three of China's e-retailers on book sales. Earlier this year, Alibaba released a report on the reading situation of Chinese people in 2018, which showed that in 2018, more than 1 billion copies of books were sold by Tmall, equivalent to one third of the total sales of print books in China. Up to now, Tmall Book has become a platform hosting more than 3000 private booksellers and more than 400 publishing houses at home and abroad. Dangdang, Amazon, Boku, Xinhua Winshare and other large-scale self-run book platforms have joined Tmall, and launched in-depth cooperation with each other.
Some experts believe that cooperation with Tmall Book has given publishers more autonomy over channels, and have more control on dealing with the book discounting issue. Some presses have even set up Tmall-oriented product development department to fully explore new publishing process based on sales prospects and focusing on zero inventory.
The report also shows that readers of different ages have their own characteristics in choosing contents. Readers born in the 80s prefer books on parenting and education. English and civil service examination textbooks are the most popular among readers born in the 90s. And readers born after 2000 like to buy English CET-4 and CET-6 textbooks and are also keen on YA fiction.
Children's books leading the online sales market
Jingdong Book, a division of e-retailer Jingdong Mall, jointly established the Joint Research Institute of Reading and Industrial Development in 2018 with the Openbook Information Technology Co., Ltd. and released an annual report at the end of that year.
According to the data, in 2018, Jingdong Book achieved a rapid growth with books on Children's, social sciences, literature and education, while Children's books were the fastest growing categories.
From the perspective of each category in 2018, except fictions, the pricing of other categories of books increased significantly, with the price of children's books rising by 17.8% compared with 2016, becoming the category with the biggest price increase in three years. The overall price rise of books, to a large extent, was due to the rising cost of paper, staff and logistics. Some experts predict that the price of books in China will probably continue to rise in 2019.
There are 62 suppliers on Jingdong Book Platform, who offer books to JD, with a sales revenue exceeded 10 million yuan, and their growth rate was more than 100% year on year. By the end of 2018, there are 183 book suppliers and 436 indie shops hosted on JD.com platform.
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Popular categories 2018 are still children's books, followed by books of culture, education, literature, social sciences, economic management, self-improvement, science and technology and life arts. Among them, classical books have an enduring appeal. As can be seen from the annual TOP 10 Bestsellers in JD.com, except Principles, which is a new book in 2018, the others all were published in the previous year or even earlier. Red Star over China, Six Chapters of Floating Life (full translation) and Alive were the top three bestsellers of the year. Seven of the e-book bestsellers in TOP10 have also entered the TOP 200 of the print bestseller list, which shows that good books sold in print can also have good sales as e-books.
For Dangdang, another big e-retailer, children's books continue to lead the sale of various categories of books in 2018. Children's books accounted for 25.9% of the total sales of books in the whole year, with an annual sales of 620 million copies. In the sub-category of Dangdang children's books in 2017, children's literature accounted for 30%, popular science 20%, picture books 21%, all of which accounted for 71% of the total, which increased to 73.7% by 2018. This demonstrates that parents think highly of the three sub-categories and their purchasing power has increased as well.
In 2018, Yu Hua's Alive and Hosseini's The Kite Runner were the top two books in the TOP 10 list for fiction category on Dangdang website. These two books have dominated the list for many years. Among the non-fiction books on the list are Three of Us, Fifteen Years of Wanli Emperor in Ming Dynasty, Genius in the Left and Madman in the Right, etc.
In 2018, Dangdang's book sales grew by 45%, including 1.5 billion copies sold by itself. Dangdang in recent years is taking aim at the booming offline bookstore market as well. Since launching its first physical bookstore in 2016, 12 new stores were added in 2018 alone, indicating its extremely rapid expansion in more than 20 cities across the country. The membership size of its bookstores also exceeded 200,000 in 2018 from 20,000 in 2016. Undoubtedly, the offline operation will further enhance Dangdang's ability to select books and make recommendation based on big data.
Being active on e-reading market
Unlike in the past, the way readers read books has undergone tremendous changes as testified by varied formats including print books, e-books, mobile phone-based apps, audio books and so on. Accordingly, Tmall, Dangdang, Jingdong and other platforms have built up their strategies on e-reading market.
In June 2018, Ali Literature, partnered with Tmall Book, launched an app named Tmall Reading, to help turn print books into electronic ones. Tmall officials said that it will devote itself to creating a panoramic learning platform covering print books, e-books and audio books. Over the past six months, Tmall Reading has received more than 25 million orders of e-books.
As early as 2011, Dangdang launched the app named "Dangdang Reading" to catch up with the digital reading market. In 2017, it changed its name to "Dangdang Cloud Reading" and introduced its e-reader hardware. The app provides readers with officially published e-books adapted to mobile phones. So far, more than 500,000 titles have gone online,including e-books, audio books, online literature, comics and other digital books. Dangdang Cloud Reading achieved a 63% increase in e-book sales in 2018 over the previous year, the number of times of reading increased 96% and the average reading time per day was 42 minutes.
At the same time, Jingdong is also entering the field of publishing and digital reading. In 2016, Jingdong released an app called "Nezha Reading"(Nezha is a lovely character in China's fairy tale，derived from a protection deity in Chinese folk religion) for children, which combines print books with digital technology to snatch a share in the children's reading market.
Chinese book e-retailers are expected to further upgrade the reading industry, and eventually build a new eco-system covering purchase, reading, book-sharing, recommendation, and IP derivation.
（translated by Wang Qiuhai）
