The Librairie Avant- Garde in Nanjing, the largest indie bookstore in Jiangsu Province specializes in the humanities and social sciences. Photo: CFP

After a hard day’s study, many students at Nankai University in Tianjin head to the southwest gate where they find quick nourishment at the many small restaurants and then satisfy their intellectual curiosity at a crowded and bustling indie bookstore called Catbook. 

Located on the first floor of a shabby residential building, the 40-square-meter independent bookstore is packed with books on literature, art and design. It is also home to a number of stray cats.

Although it’s trying to tap the university crowd, you won’t find books on how to pass Test of English as a Foreign Language or graduate school prep exams at Catbook. Even best-sellers make up only a small number of the books crammed into every shelf that lines the walls. 

“We don’t sell popular books, only books that last and enlighten,” said He Shujing, a co-founder of the bookstore.
 
Lofty ideals

As one of two indie bookstores near the school, Catbook has seemingly raised the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the campus since it opened a year ago last March. Unfortunately, lofty ideals won’t ensure its survival.   

In fact, the Catbook is barely able to make ends meet, which just about meets He and her partners’ expectations. 
“We did not expect to make money. We’re doing this out of our own interest.”

He is worried that the bookstore won’t survive the neighborhood’s redevelopment. 

“Recently Nankai University has changed its leadership and we heard news that this market area would be swept away,” she said. 

For a variety of reasons, many small, independent bookstores in China appear in danger of being swept away.
  
Near Fudan University in Shanghai the 8-year-old Qingyun Bookstore closed down on June 6, the third indie bookstore near the campus to go bankrupt in the last six months. 

“It is the dark night for the bookstore industry, we can’t see any twilight,” Zhang Qing, the bookstore manager told the Shanghai-based Youth Daily. 

Moved six times in six years

Booyee bookstore owner, Hu Tong, is moving his bookstore for the sixth time in six years. He first opened his bookstore in a hutong in Dongdan in downtown Beijing. Each successive move has taken his store further away from the city center. Skyrocketing rents in Beijing have driven Hu’s bookstore to outside the East 4th Ring Road. 

Booyee’s specialty is out-of-print books on the humanities. It also sells new limited-edition books and some rare antique books. 

Before opening his bookstore Hu collected art books. He quit his job as an art teacher in 2002 to focus on managing the bookstore. He says he has a stable of customers who collect books as a hobby. 

“Unless you add other services to make the bookstore a place for social interaction, it will be very hard to survive,” he added.

Although his shop is now only half the size of his original one, Hu has replaced books shelves with his computer. He said much of his business now comes from online orders. 

While Hu has managed to keep afloat by moving part of his specialty book business to the Internet, he knows he can’t compete with the big online booksellers.  

“I have to avoid competition with online booksellers such as Dangdang, Amazon, and 360Buy,” Hu said of his business strategy. 

An end to competition

On May 17, the Beijing-based e-commerce website, 360Buy, advertised a 60 percent discount on children’s books.

The next day 24 publishers of children’s literature issued a joint statement denouncing 360Buy for selling below cost and underselling the competition with the aim of driving them out of business.

The statement antagonized Liu Qiangdong, the CEO of 360Buy. “We will sell books from these 24 publishers at a 60 percent discount forever,” Liu wrote on his microblog the next day. 

Liu believes book publishers are to blame for the current crisis in the industry and he wants to break their long-held strange hold. “The authors are being paid miserably so they don’t want to write, and distribution isn’t effective so prices are high and readers don’t want to buy,” he wrote. 

On June 1, 360Buy.com announced on its website that it would pay 3 percent of revenues from book sales directly to the authors. 

A recent indie bookstore forum in Chongqing concluded that the ruthless competition seems on the verge of sacrificing the entire publishing industry, reported the Wenhui Book Review.

The manager of the Guangzhou-based bookstore XOOYO,Chen Dingfang, complained that bookstores have become the unintended showrooms for online sellers.

“Many shoppers scan a book’s bar code with their cell phone and then search online for prices that are sometimes lower than the prices even we can get from our wholesalers or publishers,” the Wenhui Book Review reported Chen as saying.

In January 2010, the Publishers’ Association in China, the Books and Periodicals Distribution Association of China and Xinhua Bookstores, demanded a new regulation that would prevent new books from being sold online for less than 85 percent of their cover prices. 

“In China, the authority for managing and regulating the publishing industry is the government, not the associations,” wrote Liu Suli, the founder of All Sages Books in Haidian District of Beijing, on the bookstore’s website.

Liu called the proposed regulation a “farce and a tragedy. If the government, media, and readers don’t understand what the publishing industry means to a nation and find ways to protect it, then our country will develop into a huge proud monster without a mind or culture,” he wrote.

Liu’s bookstore is considered by many to be the flagship seller of academic works and books by progressive thinkers. He opened All Sages Books 18 years ago. 

Liu warns readers that their bargain-hunting shopping habits are short-sighted and may indirectly kill the content providers. Trying to buck a global trend 

Zhou Qing hopes to open her own bookstore some day but for now writes a blog “My Own Indie Bookstore.” It recounts her trip to eight European countries in 2008, where she visited more than 100 indie bookstores and took more than 1,000 pictures. 

Now living in Shanghai, Zhou keeps updating her blog with news about indie bookstores and publishers worldwide. 

However, she’s not about to rush to achieve her bookstore dream in the face of fierce competition. “I am at the stage of establishing my icon online and eventually a bookstore will be the result ,” 

“I think literati can not run bookstores successfully. An indie bookstore is a combination of taste and business.” 

Zhang Yun, a Los Angeles-based freelance translator, believes online booksellers can’t replace bookstores. 

“In the US, the indie bookstore plays an important role in community life. For example, they promote regional authors who might not be famous nationwide.”

As a frequent consumer of indie bookstores, Zhang sees the decline of indie bookstores as an irreversible global trend. 

She recalls a bookstore that specialized in mystery novels that recently closed down in her neighborhood in Los Angeles. “The rent was a major problem, and the landlord has been giving the owner a discount for years.”

Zhang thinks supportive readers and community are key to the future of indie bookstores. Book buying “isn’t only an exchange of money for a product,” she said. “I would rather spend a bit more if it means the bookstore will survive.”

Independent Bookstores in China

Indie bookstores in China are far different than the state-owned Xinhua Bookstores or private commercial chains stores. An indie bookstore usually has only one location that is managed by the store owner, who has an interest and expertise in a one or two genre of books or subjects. Most indie bookstores don’t carry best sellers or textbooks and survive by carving out a niche and gaining respect from their clients. 

Among the most popular indie bookstore in China are the All Sages Books in Beijing which specializes in academic literature and progressive books; the Port Bookstore in Shanghai which specializes in literature and the Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing which specializes in humanities and social sciences.