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The Internet era
Internet Plus is currently a buzzword in China, referring to the adoption of Internet technology by conventional industries. The culture and entertainment industry is no exception to the changes, stated Chen Shaofeng, Vice Dean of the Institute for Cultural Industries in Peking University.
"The emergence of the Internet has helped people spend more time online, and as a result, the audience of the traditional cultural and entertainment industry is shrinking," said Chen.
Nonetheless, he also expressed that it has also created a huge opportunity for industrial transformation, through the innovation of business models and channels.
Changes have taken place in the lives of Ning Chengfang and Chen Linxiao as well. Nowadays, they seldom go to bookstores. Instead, they prefer to order books online.
Even so, the couple still have plenty of opportunities to go to physical bookstores. Dangdang.com, for instance, recently announced its plan to open 1,000 brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country throughout the next three years.
"Compared to virtual bookstores, physical bookstores can greatly improve customers' shopping experience," said Yao Dansai, Senior Vice President of Dangdang.com.
The company's plan echoes Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's call for citizens to read more in order to construct a "society of learning" in last year's government work report.
Recently, the CITIC Press Group, a famous publishing group in China, also announced a plan to launch more than 1,000 bookstores nationwide.
Physical books are not as important to Wu Weiwei, Chen and Ning's young neighbor who was born in the 1990s. Growing up in the digital era, he has become accustomed to buying and reading books online.
Although Wu and his wife Sun Hongxi are both avid readers, few books can be seen in their home. Rather than stacking books on bookshelves, they store their "books" in various devices as well as on the cloud, a network of online storage.
According to data from the Ministry of Culture, China currently has 670 million netizens, among which 290 million or one fifth, are literature lovers. "At least 30 million people have published work online, and 1 million are registered writers," Sun said, adding that she herself was preparing to write her own work.
Online literature associations have also mushroomed across the country, while some famous national literature awards such as the Mao Dun Literature Prize are now open to Internet writers. Literature on the Internet was predicted to generate a market value of more than 7 billion yuan ($1.08 billion) in 2015, according to People's Daily .
In addition, young people such as Wu and Sun spend a significant length of time using mobile Internet.
According to Analysys International, a company dedicated to helping traditional companies improve their online marketing skills, Chinese residents born in the 1990s spend an average of 3.8 hours on mobile Internet, with 56.1 percent of that time dedicated to entertainment,18.7 percent higher than those born in the 1980s. The company predicted that by 2020, those born in the 1990s will increase their share of total expenditure in entertainment and education by 10 percentage points.
In January, OpenBook, a company that monitors China's book sales released a report on the country's book retail market in 2015. The report demonstrated that the country's mobile reading market had reached 10.8 billion yuan ($1.66 billion) in value last year, up 22 percent year-on-year. The paper also showed that those born in the 1990s are major players in the market.
Furthermore, book sales through online bookstores also grew rapidly in 2015, up 33.21 percent year-on-year, while total retail book sales went up by 12.8 percent, according to the report.
China currently has 170 million people born in the 1990s. Industry insiders believe that compared with their parents and grandparents, this generation, born in a period featuring rapid economic growth and higher disposable family income, are less inclined to save and more likely to participate in the cultural market. Their influence on the future of the country's cultural development is expected to be significant.
Copyedited by Bryan Michael Galvan
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