In this semester, I was lucky to attend the 2017 London Book Fair. This is a big festival for the whole publishing industry, I learned a lot from it, and I was surprised by the achievement of Chinese Publishing Market in last year discussed at the Book Fair.

The Chinese Book Retail Market

Firstly, there were 215,000 new books published in 2016 (4.3% increase), and total retail book sales exceeded 834 million GBP. Physical stores made up 63% of sales, while online Stores accounted for 37%.

Further, 1.3 million titles sold through physical stores, 1.2 million titles sold through online stores, amounted to 20 billion Yuan, continued growth since 2010.

Chinese E-book Market

The Combined revenue from e-books, online periodicals, and digital newspapers was 6.2 billion Yuan, that means the average annual revenue increased 78% between 2006 to 2013. In addition, 50.1% of Chinese readers prefer reading in a digital format. The most popular platform in China is DangDang website. There are over 15 million users on it, who spend on average over 50 minutes per day. In this website, they have more than 200,000 e-book titles available, and sold 66 million books in 2014, 20 percent of total book sales.

What Sells in China?

The most popular types of book are biographies, best sellers, award winners and famous authors and new technical developments.

American, British and Japanese books all sell well in the Chinese market. Further, the bestseller classification of foreign books is Children’s books, second is literature, next one is biographical books.

I think all the data shows that Chinese Publishing Market is entering a blooming time, an increasing number people start to read, no matter whether the books are Chinese or foreign language books, and that means Chinese publishing industry will grow. From the speech, there are a lot of people around the world who notice the Chinese Publishing Market.

        by Yangrui Wu