Home 5 Articles and Reports 5 Beijing Moves to Protect its Bookshops

Beijing Moves to Protect its Bookshops

by | Jul 26, 2018 | Articles and Reports

Nasher

 

China is acting to protect Beijing’s physical bookshops.  The authorities are providing subsidies worth almost £5.7m to help pay for at least 40% of rents and improvements to bookshops.  The plan is to encourage more than 700 bookshops to open across the greater Beijing region, bringing the total number to more than 1700.

 

Zhang Su, deputy director of the Beijing bureau of press, publication, radio, film and television, said: “Brick-and-mortar bookstores are an important part of a city’s cultural infrastructure. They carry the memories of a city, they embody a city’s cultural heritage and they affect a city’s cultural ambience.”

 

The authorities have decided that bookshops are integral to the city’s future.  “We cannot rely on the market to ease the bricks-and- mortar bookshops’ existential difficulties, and a government policy supporting them is absolutely necessary,” Zhang said.

The city authorities want each of Beijing’s 16 districts to have a “highly visible” bookshop, in shopping centres, sightseeing spots, transportation hubs and densely populated neighbourhoods. They can open 24 hours a day and public libraries will also set up branches inside bookshops and vice-versa, bookshops can open in libraries.

The requirement that a bookshop must have been in business for three years in order to receive subsidies has been scrapped, which means that more are eligible to benefit.  The city has also extended a clause to exempt all bookstores from sales taxes.

The question of how much the state should intervene in the protection of bookshops is one the book industry wrestles with from country to country.  In France and Germany, for example, discounting of books is illegal in order to create a level playing field for smaller outlets.  The UK used to have such a system – called the Net Book Agreement – but it collapsed in 1995.  The next two decades saw a decline in the number of independent bookstores as a result, though that slow-down has now halted.

China’s move to help the capitals’ bookshops will be watched with interest by the international book community.

Recent News

24Jun
Boris Johnson to “Unleash” Political Tell-All Amidst Election Turmoil

Boris Johnson to “Unleash” Political Tell-All Amidst Election Turmoil

HarperCollins wins former PM’s memoirs With the Conservatives trailing in the polls in the UK, HarperCollins has announced it is to publish the memoirs of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  Unleashed will be published in the UK by William Collins on 10 October and in the US by Harper on 15 October.   The Conservatives […]

20Jun
Harry Potter Rarity Auctioned for Over $57,000

Harry Potter Rarity Auctioned for Over $57,000

A rare edition of J.K. Rowling’s cherished novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, has fetched $57,200 at an auction in Edinburgh, Scotland. This copy is among the first 500 printed in 1997, distinguished by a misspelling of “Philosopher’s” and a duplicate listing of “1 wand” on the equipment list on page 53, making these […]

20Jun
A new Healing Fiction: ‘The Yeonnam-dong Smiley Laundromat’

A new Healing Fiction: ‘The Yeonnam-dong Smiley Laundromat’

The UK’s MacleHose Press, part of Hachette-owned Quercus, has bought the latest example of what some are dubbing ‘healing fiction’.  MacLehose Press will publish Korean feel-good bestseller Yeonnam-dong’s Smiley Laundromat by first-time author Kim Jiyun in August 2024. It will be released in a translation by Shanna Tan, whose first book, Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to […]

Related Posts

Books published in June 2024

Books published in June 2024

  Sandwich by Catherine Newman The book is narrated by a menopausal Rocky on her family’s annual summer trip to Cape Cod. Sandwiched between her nearly-adult children and ageing parents, all of whom have descended on the coastal apartment for the week, her whole...

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin: Book Review

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin: Book Review

When Uzma Jalaluddin's debut novel ‘Ayesha At Last’ was first published, it was hailed as a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’  which has become somewhat of a trend as South Asian adaptations of the book have become quite popular recently . Ayesha...

Oodi Library: A Cultural and Architectural Marvel in Helsinki

Oodi Library: A Cultural and Architectural Marvel in Helsinki

The Oodi Library, located in Helsinki, Finland, is a modern architectural marvel and a cornerstone of the city's cultural and intellectual life. Opened on December 5, 2018, Oodi is more than just a traditional library; it is a multifunctional space that embodies the...

Previous Next
Close
Test Caption
Test Description goes like this

Pin It on Pinterest
https://nashernews.com/beijing-moves-to-protect-its-bookshops/
nashernews.com
CC-MAIN-2024-26
288487
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:T2OSQXEMUJ2OVOAJDDQPLMISTMRUS7KM
<urn:uuid:90bb5f1e-ea6c-4653-859d-aa696c72472f>
2024-06-24T12:44:03Z
141.193.213.11
text/html
sha1:3JEZIWCKCDMJBZFNMCDDGXZW7P4Y7FES
<urn:uuid:e97b831c-aee2-436d-89c2-17a75b1f43c6>
https://nashernews.com/beijing-moves-to-protect-its-bookshops/
response
<urn:uuid:c1049b1f-284a-4db0-9d6c-3a9c46068762>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-37
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/