The hegemony of mobile publishing
China docet
The history of technological revolutions teaches us that countries with a certain cultural or technical backwardness are more prone than more developed countries to innovation which tends to establish itself more quickly and with fewer obstacles in mentality, consumption and production methods. New technologies encounter thin barriers and incumbents too weak to block their progress. Furthermore, the commercial and distribution methods, with which these technologies are revisited and adapted to the most backward local markets, can take on national specificities which in the end strongly benefit the late comers.
This is what happened in China in many sectors dominated by technology and it is what is happening today with the Chinese cultural industry. Let's take publishing. Unlike Europe and the United States, where the printed word industry has a very long and vital industrial and cultural tradition, it has less roots in China. A state of affairs that has favored the spread and affirmation of digital publishing which has occurred rather rapidly and almost naturally, one might say. Because digital publishing is an enormously simplified and more efficient system than the traditional one for getting content to the general public.
According to official data, about half a million books are published in China every year and 66 of these exceed one million copies sold. As the table below shows, China is the country where every year, in absolute values, the greatest number of novelties are published, overtaking the leading market, the USA, by about 150 units. Despite these data d
impressive in themselves, the Chinese market has enormous development potential. In China, 335 titles are published for every million inhabitants, which is very few if we consider the 1043 in the United States, the 2710 in the United Kingdom and also the 1078 in Italy. There is much, much room for growth in China. And this space will be occupied by digital as all analysts predict.
New titles published in 2015 for millions of inhabitants:
The turnover of the trade market in China is 10,5 billion euros and is surpassed only by the US one which is worth about 25 billion euros.
Million Dollar Value of the Book Trade Market:
But there is one fact that we do not find fully deployed in Western markets. It is the one relating to the diffusion of mobile publishing. The report on the Chinese book industry, presented at the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, in fact estimates the revenues of mobile publishing at 10,5 billion euros, the same value generated by the entire book industry. A first scenario emerges: the Chinese study and learn from books, while in their free time and for pleasure they read on smartphones and read, above all, new narrative formats that they find online on specialized platforms.
Publish with Chinese characteristics
The publishing ecosystem that is taking shape in China is not the Amazon-centric one of Western countries or of self-publishing in ebooks, but is made up of online publishing platforms and applications that are particularly winning over young authors. A XNUMX-year-old Beijing writer sees it very simple, like this: "Let's write on the Internet and see what happens." In fact, she didn't take long to be discovered on the Douban literary site. She says: “I published stories about Douban that many people liked so a publisher found me and published them… Then these stories were collected in a book and eventually became the subject of a film”. The young writer is not at all surprised by her almost instantaneous success: “It is easy to publish a book in China because there are so many readers and publishing is not such a special event as it is in your country. Everyone writes and there are many readers”.
There is a certain hyperbole in this statement, but it's not all that far from reality. Chinese writers write everything on free online platforms: short stories, essays, articles, screenplays, movie reviews, recipes, and so on. Douban is built according to certain standards of Chinese courtesy, for example readers can gratify their favorite stories by sending flowers and even a few coins to their authors as a sign of gratitude.
Writers are turning to the web because the traditional publishing industry is quite busy and hard to reach. State ownership of many Chinese publishing houses is an obstacle to innovation. For example, the adoption of ebooks by the latter has been very slow; being poorly market oriented, they have little incentive to experiment and seek out new ways to reach the reader. Furthermore, the improvement of the Chinese infrastructural system has made the home delivery service much more efficient than in the past and made the extraordinary phenomenon of e-commerce possible; an improvement which paradoxically favored traditional commodities such as the book over their digital competitors such as the ebook which initially had a logistical advantage which has since disappeared.
The Chinese government has moved to encourage the spread of ebooks and something is beginning to be seen in the traditional world of publishing as reported in Publishers Weekly by Zhu Yeyang, a media analyst at the Beijing International Book Fair. Nothing yet that reflects the vivacity and dynamism that takes place on the web and on mobile.
Mobile publishing platforms
Douban, founded in 2005 by Tang Bo, a young entrepreneur who graduated in computer science at the University of California San Diego, has grown to become, with its 200 million registered users, one of the most important social networks in China. However, the lion's share of mobile publishing is held by the giant Tencent Holdings, which contends with Alibaba for hegemony in the new Chinese economy. Two offshoots of Tencent are very popular among authors and readers. The first is the legendary WeChat, an instant messaging app and much more, with over 700 million registered users. WeChat is widely used by writers to publish various materials including series. The other is China Reading, also a publishing platform that also offers over 10 million ebooks. China Reading recently announced its intention to go public in Hong Kong by the end of 2017 with an IPO worth between $600 million and $800 million. A considerable evaluation for an entrepreneurial entity that operates in the publishing sector and that finds little comparison in the West.
Shuan Rein, managing director of China Market Research in Shanghai, is very optimistic about China Reading's growth prospects due to its growing popularity as a publishing platform for writers and first-timers. “For online authors – explains Shuan Rein – there are fewer restrictions on publishing online than on paper. Publishing a book is a more complicated and slow process because you have to go through a publisher, often a state-owned, non-market-oriented and underperforming establishment. For an author it can also be expensive to take this path, so they prefer to publish online which is an instantaneous act and can quickly lead to the construction of a good base of loyal readers, who are the capital on which to build a career". This is also the main capital of China Reading and the foundation of its substantial shareholder value.
Furthermore, online and mobile also play an important cultural role because they fill a content gap left by publishers who gravitate towards traditional and safe genres. This is why online and mobile have become a great laboratory for experimenting with genres, formats and relationships.
The online reading public
According to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center, more than 300 million Chinese read literature online, mostly via mobile devices, and estimates that these digital readers spend about 30 minutes a day reading on their devices. Authors can earn revenue through advertising, subscriptions or direct payments made by platforms that compensate the content provider. It's a model not unlike YouTube's. The attention of the audience attracted by authors to these free platforms can later be monetized when their works can become books, films, TV dramas or video games, a hugely popular form of entertainment in China, perhaps the most popular as shown by the recent acquisition of Supercell (Clash of Clans, Hay Day, Boom Beach, Clash Royale) by Tencent.
The reading public is fundamentally young: around 75% are between 10 and 39 years of age. The two largest demographics are students (25%) and the self-employed (10%) with a high school education and monthly income between $300 and $700. According to OECD calculations, this value must be multiplied by 3,5 to obtain the actual purchase value of these wages.
China for foreign publishers
For foreign publishers, China's digital transformation offers great opportunities, because the market is just in its infancy and there is enormous potential. For example Yeeyan, an online crowdsourcing community, is translating a large number of Chinese texts by employing many translators simultaneously. In 2016, the best-selling fiction was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, fifth place went to the Japanese Keigo Higashinoa, sixth to Gabriel García Marquez, eighth to the French narrator Marc Levy. Also in the non-fiction in the first position is a non-Chinese author, the Scottish Johanna Basford with The secret garden. Basford places a second title (The Enchanted Forest) in fifth place preceded in fourth place by the technologist Peter Thiel with his From Zero to One. Even in the children's book four of the top ten positions are occupied by Western writers.
In 2014, China purchased 15.500 securities from abroad including 5.000 from the United States, 2.700 from the United Kingdom, 1.750 from Japan and 1.160 from Korea. An increase of 14% over the previous year for a total value of 126 million dollars divided as follows: 21,58% school books and culture, 15.39% philosophy and social sciences, 11.37% literature and art, 5.48% children's books, 28.61 % others.
Well! It's really time to get moving.
