By Porter Anderson, editor-in-chief @Porter_Anderson
Digital retail sales rose 6.74%, while physical bookstores fell 47.36% to the first part of 2019.
As readers of Publishing Perspectives, our best-selling updates in China are produced in partnership with the company, OpenBook is a personal industry knowledge research company founded in Beijing. As of July 1, the OpenBook retail market formula sample covered more than 10,000 e-book and online retail stores nationwide.
The main point of comparison that our partners in Beijing make today (July 17) is their first quarter report, which showed a decrease from January to March of almost 16% in the same era of the first quarter of 2019.
It is attractive to note the relative continuity of pandemic trends in the sale of e-books in relation to physical sales. In the first quarter, when the first primary outbreaks of the pathogen devastated parts of the continent, online retail sales in China grew by 3.02% and physical e-books fell by 54.8%.
Compare those figures with today’s six-month earnings for 6.74% virtual retail and physical sales recovering some traction to the point of falling 47.36% during the same six-month period of 2019, and it’s tempting to think we’re seeing a new boost in online retail and a slow recovery of bricks and mortar. This, however, can be misleading.
China, as the highest countries, continues to combat the progress of contagion.
Our OpenBook affiliates point to June, when the capital itself was shaken by an epidemic, after a 55-day run without reported transmission. On June 17, Dennis Normile of the journal Science cited Xinhua, based in the state, who reported 137 new cases. Very disruptive locks have been implemented and OpenBook confirms that even now, primary physical libraries have not been completely reopened.
This morning, the BBC reports that flights from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, were cancelled due to an outbreak. And, as Sui-Lee Wee and Mariana Simes write for the New York Times, a Beijing-backed offer was made to workers at PetroChina, a state-owned company, to use one of two alleged unproven vaccines. “They would really be guinea pigs,” Wee and Sises write, “to test unproven vaccines outside the gates of official clinical trials.”
He’s still unstable, in other words. At the time of writing, the update at 5:34 a.m. ET (9:34 a.m. GMT) from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center shows that China ranks 25th in the world by the number of COVID-19 cases, with 85314 infections and a death toll of 4,644 in a population of 1.4 billion.
According to OpenBook research, Chinese Tier 1 and 2 cities have the maximum effect on their bookstores. As you may know, the market uses a grade formula to rank city length, although rating problems are not reliably coded and are based on points beyond population length, such as advertising viability. The 4 main Cities of Level 1 are, of course, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and the momently regularly includes Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing, Dalian, Zhengzhou and others.
Physical bookstores in these major centers, especially the largest facilities, are “seriously affected,” our OpenBook partners say, in The SuperCities of Level 1, recording a 55% drop in the first six months of 2019 and a recession of at least 50 in Level 2 cubes.
Much of this is attributed through the study team to state closure measures for the spread of the virus in these centers, which is incredibly valuable to the national economy. Bookstores in the north of the country recorded the biggest year-on-year declines in the first part of the year, to 57.57%, which would be related to the “second wave” outbreaks last spring.
As mentioned, online retail channels in China, after experiencing early disruptions in shipping logistics, benefited from the pandemic, making a profit of 6.74% year-over-year in the first six months of 2020.
Part of this construction includes classic mid-year promotions on June 18, which are still for virtual retail platforms. And the OpenBook team sees uninterrupted blur, even in virtual commerce, by moving the times to tests, epidemics, and mitigation strategies.
After a significant drop in the production of new names on the books, 70 according to one hundred publishers reported outages in their launch programs in March, more new content hit the market in April, May and June. OpenBook sees that the launch speed of the new name is successful at a point comparable to that of the same consistent period in 2019.
With regard to the graphical effects of the best-selling Chinese market, we will look for more data for you in our upcoming monthly bestseller report in China.
Reports from Chinese bestsellers publishing Perspectives are here. And more of our statistical policy of global editing is here.
To learn more about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and its effect on the publication of foreign e-books, click here and on the CORONAVIRUS tab on the most sensible page of our website.
OpenBook is a personal industry knowledge research company founded in Beijing. It works very similarly to Nielsen and NDP West, and Nielsen Book Research International has worked with OpenBook in Asian operations. With authorized knowledge and data resources, OpenBook will provide an advisory service to partners who wish to explore the Chinese e-book market and identify appropriate partners.
Tags: eBook sales, ebookstore, ebookstores, China, coronavirus, COVID-19, distribution, online retail, openBook, statistics, chain