Sales go up in China, driven by e-commerce and demand for textbooks and educational literature, Xing Yi reports.
Educational books and textbooks dominated China's online book sales in 2018, thanks to the convenience brought about by the country's booming e-commerce, according to industry reports.
China's overall book market in 2018 reached a value of 89.4 billion yuan ($13.22 billion), up 11.3 percent from 2017, according to an annual report released by the Beijing-based research firm, Openbook, on Jan 9.
The increase was driven by the surge in online sales, which grew by 24.7 percent from the previous year to reach 57.3 billion yuan, while sales at brick-and-mortar stores dropped by 6.69 percent year-on-year, says the report.
In other reports jointly released by Openbook and e-commerce company JD, in December, the top two best-selling categories on the latter's platform were children's books, which accounted for 24.5 percent of sales, and textbooks, reference books and test guides that came in second, making for 18.7 percent of the company's book sales.
In general, the reports says men bought more books pertaining to job training and certificate tests, while women bought more books on early childhood education and young adult education.
"Men buy books for themselves, while women buy books for their offspring," says Openbook's research manager Feng Xiaohui.
Similar findings were reported by e-commerce platforms that are actively involved in book sales, such as Dangdang and Alibaba's Tmall and Taobao.
Alibaba registered an increase of more than 30 million buyers purchasing books on its e-commerce platforms, with 5.5 being the average number of printed books bought per customer, according to a report issued by the e-commerce giant on Jan 8.
The majority of online buyers were young with three quarters of them aged below 40, according to the report.
Parents and children at Page One, a stylish bookstore located in Beijing's downtown Qianmen area. Educational books and children's books account for a majority of the sales in China. [PHOTO BY KUANG LINHUA/CHINA DAILY]
Educational books and test preparation books accounted for nearly 40 percent of book sales on Tmall, while the most popular books among those aged between 30 and 40 were parenting and educational books for children. Those in their 20s mostly bought books on English and administrative tests, while teenagers favored guide books for college English exams and young adult fiction.
Zhang Wei, manager of the book department at Tmall, says part of the online sales growth came from purchases made in remote rural areas, such as certain parts of the Tibet and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions, thanks to publishing houses opening special postal delivery services for students there.
Liu Yu, manager of the children's book department at another big Chinese online store, Dangdang, says the company sold 620 million children's books in 2018, which accounted for 25.9 percent of the whole book section's total sales.
Sun Lijun, a professor at Renmin University of China who specializes in publishing, says educational books and textbooks have long been the largest proportion of published books in China, which is something that many publishers have wanted to change for some time.
"The country's strength in publishing should be reflected in a flourishing and diverse book market," Sun says. "But right now, Chinese people are still more interested in textbooks and exam guides because they see reading as a utilitarian act.
"People want to see a direct benefit from reading a book," he adds. "That is the mentality which has resulted in the popularity of test preps and other educational and self-help books."
