Where will e-books go in the future？ Trendy things that had high hopes are facing new challenges.
Parents and children are reading in spring in Binhai New Village Kindergarten, West Coast New District, Qingdao, Shandong Province. Xinhua news agency
Children read in a multifunctional reading room in Lanzhou, Gansu province. Xinhua news agency
Citizens read in Qinghe Bookstore, Yueqing City, Zhejiang Province. Xinhua news agency
Readers read books in the Hongen Temple of Jiangbei District Library in Chongqing. Xinhua news agency
Is it time to say goodbye to e-books? This trendy thing, which had high hopes more than a decade ago, is now facing some new challenges — —
In the early spring, the Beijing Book Fair, known as the "wind vane of publishing industry", blew a new wind direction: the e-book booth disappeared, and the center of the exhibition hall was a live broadcast room;
On June 30 this year, Amazon will stop the operation of China Kindle e-books;
Recently, an article entitled "Farewell to e-books" attracted attention. The article said that "the domestic e-book business has been very difficult in the past two or three years" and "the development of e-books for more than ten years has proved that they can’t subvert the publishing industry at all".
Many experts and insiders believe that the current development of e-books has entered a bottleneck period. In just over a decade, the wave of digitalization has been wave after wave, and the emergence of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technology this year has aroused widespread concern. Great changes have taken place in knowledge dissemination and content production, from electronic batch writing to artificial intelligence generating content.
Report to the 20th CPC National Congress, the Communist Party of China, put forward the strategy of "implementing the digitalization of national culture", and the "Overall Layout Plan of Digital China Construction" recently issued put forward the idea of "building a confident and prosperous digital culture". Taking the pulse of e-books as an "early" cultural digitalization phenomenon will bring enlightenment to the future digital culture and digital publishing construction.
Catch the express train: the "spring" of e-books is very short.
"When I was in high school, our class had a Kindle (e-book reader). Everyone was holding a Kindle to study, but now I haven’t seen anyone use it for a long time." Zhang Chuan, a junior at a university in Wuhan, said that the Kindle he hung on the second-hand trading website has not been successfully sold.
The e-book platform represented by Amazon Kindle cut its business and withdrew from the market in China, which triggered a great shock to the e-book industry. The article "Farewell to E-books" pointed out that several major e-book platforms "had a hard time", and related businesses and personnel were cut in 2022.
E-books were once regarded as "substitutes for paper books" and had a golden period of development.
With the advent of the mobile Internet era, 2009 is called "the first year of e-books". At that time, e-readers and mobile reading were in the ascendant, and enterprises such as Hanwang Technology and Founder Group joined the e-reader industry, and the market became increasingly hot. The three major telecom operators, led by China Mobile, began to lay out mobile reading bases one after another, thus opening the era of mobile reading. Under the expectation or worry of the public, e-books are striding forward towards the goal of "replacing paper books".
By around 2012, the smart phone has gradually become the first terminal on the Internet, and the "spring" of the rapid development of e-books has officially started — — Business broke out and revenue soared. The data shows that in 2012, the business income of China Mobile’s mobile phone reading base reached 2.5 billion yuan, the number of customers exceeded 100 million, and the average daily webpage visits reached 580 million. Mobile reading has become the main source of digital publishing income of some traditional publishing units, "2014— China Digital Publishing Industry Annual Report 2015 shows that since 2012, the average annual growth rate of e-book revenue has reached 20.5%, showing a rapid growth trend.
However, the "spring" of e-books is short-lived.
After 2014, the development of e-books showed a weak trend, and the growth rate of industrial income slowed down. Not long ago, "2021— The Annual Report of China Digital Publishing Industry in 2022 shows that the overall scale of China’s digital publishing industry reached 1,276.264 billion yuan in 2021, of which online games accounted for 296.5 billion yuan, and e-books only accounted for 6.6 billion yuan, and the latter was only a fraction of the former.
The reporter learned from CITIC Publishing Group that CITIC began its digital transformation in 2013, and e-books are only a small part of its digital reading business. At present, the digital products laid out by CITIC involve multimedia forms such as text, audio and video, including audio books, podcasts and online classes.
Is there really not much time left for e-books
Harvest the Fruits: How Big Is the Digital Field of E-books?
"I am an ordinary migrant worker. I will open an e-book to read after work, and I can read it when I take out my mobile phone in my spare time, which reduces the anxiety of inconvenient carrying of some paper books."
No matter how you read, the experience and function of reading are the most important.
— — These are two readers’ messages that the reporter picked up in Guangming Daily’s client. Undoubtedly, after more than ten years of development in technology, media and industry, e-book reading has penetrated into more people’s lives.
Wang Biao, director of the Digital Publishing Institute of China Press and Publication Research Institute, believes that from the reading level, China’s e-books have gradually entered the stage of in-depth reading. By the end of 2021, there were about 34,468,600 digital reading works in China, including about 1,805,400 e-books. In addition, in 2021, the per capita reading of e-books reached 12.
The reporter learned from "WeChat Reading" that "WeChat Reading" was launched in August 2015. At present, it has the largest library of published e-books in China. As of December 2022, it has cooperated with more than 600 publishing institutions in China and published 250,000 e-books on the shelf. The total number of registered users in history has also exceeded 300 million, and the monthly active users have exceeded 30 million.
"At present, the development of China’s e-book industry chain has gradually matured." Wang Biao said that traditional publishing units, as copyright providers of e-books, grant the copyright of e-books to third parties for production and distribution on third-party reading platforms. Some publishers have also built their own e-book platforms. In addition, companies such as Palm Reading and Migu have made full efforts in content, platform and terminal to carry out the full chain layout of e-books.
There are always many ways to interpret data. The e-book industry mentioned above is only 6.6 billion yuan in 2021, which is a fraction of the online game industry, but in 2012, the revenue of the e-book industry was only 3.1 billion yuan. In the context of development, the scale of e-book industry has been growing continuously in the past decade, but the growth rate is far behind that of online games, animation, digital music and other industries.
Many fruits have been cultivated in the "digital field" of e-books. The crux of the matter is, how big is this "field" and how many opportunities are there?
Zhao Yushan, deputy dean of the Publishing Science Research Institute of Beijing Normal University, analyzed that the bottleneck in the development of e-books is caused by many reasons. First of all, e-books are just "electronic versions of paper books", which often lags behind the listing of paper versions, and copyright protection issues such as e-book piracy and infringement have not been effectively solved. Secondly, although e-books have the advantages of portability, mass storage and convenient access, they are not enough to subvert paper books. With the maturity of communication technology, their own advantages will be gradually replaced by other reading methods. In addition, in the Internet age, the public has become accustomed to enjoying free information at hand, and guiding readers to spend money to buy an "electronic version" may indeed be a laborious and thankless thing. "Traditionally, it is considered that it is something to be proud of for a reader to sit in a bookstore, and one screen in his hand is only the representative of fast food culture." Zhao Yushan said that it is not possible to change this inherent cultural cognition in a short time.
Lack of attraction to creators is also an important factor. One author said, "The benefits of e-books to authors are very small. A paper book royalty may get several hundred thousand yuan, while the benefits of e-books on several platforms add up to only several thousand yuan."
Jump out of confusion: return to the essence of content and embrace technological innovation
E-books, audio books, podcasts, short videos, live broadcasts … … In just over ten years, the forms of media and content communication have become more and more diverse, but people’s time is limited.
"Now people around me are basically brushing short videos, and there are relatively few people reading e-books." Zhangchuan said with emotion. Authoritative reports show that as of June 2022, the number of netizens in China was 1.051 billion, and the number of users of short videos increased most obviously, reaching 962 million.
"This is an inevitable trend in the development of knowledge dissemination to a new stage." Zhao Yushan believes that technological changes and the development of social media have made the ways of knowledge consumption more and more diversified. In the past, people mainly relied on reading books and newspapers to learn knowledge and understand information. Now they can obtain information through short videos, online courses, audio programs, WeChat WeChat official account and other ways and means, which greatly diverted the time and energy of reading books (including e-books).
Where is the e-book going? In fact, with the rapid development of technology, some current puzzles will eventually become "no problem".
At the beginning of 2023, an artificial intelligence robot caused a heated discussion. It can not only realize man-machine dialogue, but also help people to do problems, write articles and write codes. AIGC technology has also become a "window" for Internet companies at home and abroad to get involved in.
"The content industry can put more energy into creative innovation." Wang Biao believes that in the future, AIGC technology may gradually replace some work that focuses on procedures, repetitiveness, information and simple induction in the content field, which can effectively improve production efficiency, service level and user experience. At the same time, the content industry should improve its ability to distinguish intelligently generated content, and judge and avoid risks in ideology and copyright.
Back to the original question, do we still need to worry about the future of e-books (even long and short videos, audio books, etc.)? Perhaps, the answer has already been written in the constant reading and knowledge demand of human beings, and the answer will also be written in the technological innovation again and again.
(Reporter Chen Xue correspondent Deng Bailu)