Current events help to turn the page

2019-07-25 10:12:41 China Daily Mo Hong'e

A reader selects books written by Louis Cha at a display set up to honor the novelist at a bookstore in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Oct 31, 2019. (Photo by LONG WEI/FOR CHINA DAILY)

Contemporary events and issues associated with them are key forces in promoting the sale of related books.

For example, after the movie The Wandering Earth was released in February, sales of the original novel in the next two days surpassed those for the entire month before the film hit the box office, according to online retailer JD.

Feng Xiaohui, manager of the research and consulting department at OpenBook, a Beijing provider of data and information services for the book industry, said the same trend has been reported at both online and offline bookstores.

"We can see from our data that when renowned Hong Kong writer Louis Cha Leung-yung died in October last year, sales of his books clearly increased for about a month, both online and offline," Feng said.

He Jing, 32, a film and television production entrepreneur, likes to follow the news and read related books.

"I don't read many popular novels, but I like to follow hot topics of the day. For example, several years ago big data was becoming popular, and I bought related books to learn more about this new topic," He said.

Yang Jing, 24, a student at the School of Digital Media& Design Arts at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, selects her own reading themes each month and reads two related books.

Her theme in May was social contact, so she read Robert B. Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion to learn more about psychology.

After she completes her reading on each topic, Yang writes a review and recommends the books on her WeChat account, named Hello Distance.

She usually reads three times a week for about 90 minutes a time. "I think reading is like making social contact with books, and you are trying to find someone who understands you in the book. It feels as if you are taking a temporary break from reality," Yang said.

According to online retailer Taobao, the number of book buyers on its platform rose by 30 million last year, up by more than 19 percent on 2017.

Online retailer Dangdang and data analysis company Analysis released reports in April showing that last year the number of books available at their book festival rose by seven times the figure for 2009, and user numbers rose by 5.7 times.

Both reports show that readers born in the 1980s and '90s have become major consumers in the online book market.

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