33. [Bonus] On World Book Day: The Death of Bookstores and People Hugging Back-to-Back

Summary

• Bookstore unit economics are broken at the root; this was the episode’s hardest conclusion. 吴晨’s math: the most expensive item on the shelves sells for RMB100, the cheapest for RMB20-30, and the model is unworkable on a sales-per-square-meter basis. “A bookstore was never something retail could make work in a purely competitive market, unless book prices doubled or tripled and every online distributor stopped discounting.” 罗叔’s real-world test found that even a 1,000-square-meter bookstore receiving RMB60K-RMB120K in monthly subsidies remained in serious trouble because of delayed payments and other issues. “Only failed businesses talk about passion.”
• E-commerce, not e-books, killed physical bookstores—and publishers handed over the knife. 罗叔 said major publishers told him not to approach marketing but their e-commerce departments, which could offer better terms; new releases launched online at less than half price. “Publishers themselves kicked bookstores out of this ecosystem.” He also noted that some overseas new releases are barred from the internet for a set period. 馋虫 cited 沈浩波’s open letter during 618 opposing e-commerce price compression. 吴晨 framed the dynamic as a prisoner’s dilemma, using 徐峥’s decision to move Lost in Thailand to Douyin as an example: not doing it could mean huge losses, while doing it would draw condemnation from the entire industry.
• 罗叔’s core lesson from his 2018 postmortem of a hybrid bookstore: people who read do not go to bookstores. A 50% influencer component multiplied by a 50% book component equals 25%: “Impressions work through multiplication; the two sides weaken each other’s necessity.” What bookstores actually sell is time and tables. “A bookstore is a place where everyone is an I-person, but they embrace one another with their backs.” Hence: “Many study rooms survived, but bookstores all died; bookstores across China are dying while coffee shops keep opening.”
• The publishing value chain’s income economics have deteriorated, and 馋虫 warns that content quality will fall. 吴晨 contrasted a former colleague’s The Victorian Internet, which became a long-selling title after being selected for recommended reading in British high schools and generated more than £10K in annual royalties—“enough to fund his pension for the rest of his life”—with current translation rates of about RMB80 per 1,000 Chinese characters. A 100K-plus-character book yields just over RMB10K, “less than we’d make writing an article.” His warning: “The most expensive part of buying a book is your time.” 馋虫’s view is that if the people who write and translate books cannot make money, the average quality of what publishing can offer will objectively decline.
• On the demand side, the root causes rank first as not reading, then treating books like commodities. 吴晨 contrasted a target of 10 books per person per year with a market that amounts to only 1.5 books, arguing that the latter is still a very small market. His solution is a marathon-style revolution in middle-class consciousness: running transformed the industry in the US in the 1970s and in China around 2005, and reading needs the same habit formation and positive feedback. Book prices “should at least not be cheaper than Pop Mart.”
• AI and short video were the episode’s biggest fault line. 馋虫 is relatively bearish over a 10-year horizon: generative AI and book-summary creators “have pushed the patience threshold to the limit,” and his consensus with media friends is that “since short video arrived, the national IQ has broadly declined.” 吴晨 countered that without returns for creators, “if nobody writes books anymore, whose books will you summarize?” 罗叔 held the line that the climb itself cannot be replaced: “Literature does not die … that is the best cosmetic surgery.”
• The most actionable side judgment: 罗叔 says secondhand bookstores in China have “no chance whatsoever.” His view is that the core product is a flea market, not a bookstore; 多抓鱼 can only replenish its cash through markets, where users often put a book back after taking a photo with it. He also said “鸟叔” and “鸟屋” would close without deep pockets, while 西西弗 is closing too; the traditional bookstore-plus-coffee format is hard to sustain. 读库’s subscription-plus-blind-box model is worth studying, but ISBN review cycles are a drag. 罗叔 sees room for more tightly edited pocket books. His vision for the future is zero-inventory forward warehouses, AI curation and human service.
• The most moving thing about books has nothing to do with the business: they are shelters. 罗叔 told the story of a down-and-out man who brought his own desk lamp, thermos and power bank to read in a paid area; after staff asked him to leave, he continued reading outside in the dark. “At certain moments, books have nothing to do with knowledge. They are a shelter for people, and we cannot allow a city to have no such place.”

Deep dive

1. The death of bookstores as a window into the era

• This was the final evening roundtable at the 2024 Shanghai Joy Podcast Festival, hosted by 卫诗婕. The guests were 罗叔, who lost heavily opening bookstores; financial writer 吴晨, who interviews one author each week on Morning Reading Time; and Dr. 馋虫, host of Jin Jin You Wei. 卫诗婕 set the frame: on the surface, the discussion was about one economic model, but “behind it, we can glimpse the era we live in.”
• One piece of foreshadowing: 卫诗婕 had originally signed up for the event because of 沈浩波, who was absent at the last minute. His open letter during 618 opposing the brutal price cuts imposed by e-commerce was later raised by 馋虫 and became a through line for the discussion.

2. 吴晨’s patron framework: stop expecting books to make money and answer 3 questions first

• 吴晨 shifted the question away from “selling books.” If we value someone’s creative work, he said, we should return to the role of the Renaissance patron: “If you think Michelangelo painted wonderfully, do you want him to set up a street stall?”
• His framework asks 3 questions: how to persuade more authors to write books, how to make publishers feel that publishing a book will not lose money, and how to keep independent bookstores alive. The most important capability of an independent bookstore is “the ability to curate,” building reading communities in local neighborhoods. His accompanying call to action: start with 6 books a year—even a booklet of a few dozen pages counts.

3. 3 bookstore memories: from Xinhua Bookstore to a S$1-a-week rental shop

• As a child, 卫诗婕’s mother left her at Xinhua Bookstore for the weekend, indirectly setting her on a career working with words. 吴晨 recalled spending several years in the library while his father worked shifts: moving from “reading books I liked,” to “books I didn’t dislike too much,” to “anything I hadn’t read yet.” Today, 吴晨 is still “following the map to fill the holes in our culture.” The two strands of memory converged so closely that he got goosebumps.
• 吴晨’s own memories came in 3 layers: the era of landmark bookstores—上海季风, 南京先锋, 杭州枫林晚 and 北京万圣—when “it meant something very different if my book made the Wansheng bestseller list”; a large Japanese bookstore on Singapore’s Orchard Road; and a rental shop charging S$1 a week, where he read Milan Kundera’s The Joke during his commute. His conclusion: “The key question is not whether we want bookstores, but whether we want books.” Taipei’s Eslite and 苏州诚品 look similar and run on similar commercial models; “the biggest difference is that the books are different.”

4. The desk-lamp man: books can be shelters, not just knowledge

• 罗叔’s most unforgettable story involved a poorly dressed man who occupied the paid area every day, bringing his own study books, thermos, desk lamp and power bank. He used the electricity without spending a cent and was eventually asked to leave by a staff member. Two days later, 罗叔 saw him sitting outside in an open-air area: dusk was approaching, the heat had dissipated and there was no power. “At certain moments, books have nothing to do with knowledge. They are a shelter for people, and we cannot allow a city to have no such place.”
• 罗叔 invited him back inside. At closing time, the man stood up and helped sweep the floor with a broom. “Many people want to solve the problems of the entire world, but you only need to solve one person’s problem.” But there are limits to sentiment: “Once the losses go beyond what you can bear, damn it, who am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who the hell is going to feel sorry for me?”

5. 卫诗婕’s rebuttal: sentiment-driven economics are unsustainable; a healthy ecosystem comes first

• After years of business reporting, 卫诗婕 said her view had changed. Consumers always hope that “merchant A and merchant B will fight until both are bloodied, while I sit back and collect the winnings.” But when a shop owner survives on sentiment alone, the imbalance eventually becomes unavoidable: “Why should I feel sorry for everyone else? Who will feel sorry for me?”
• Her standard is simple: a healthy ecosystem means the person opening the bookstore makes money. Only then can the business consider opening its doors as a refuge for people without purchasing power. Everyone should get what they need. 罗叔 later conceded: “People cannot fight human nature. I sincerely encourage everyone to buy cheaper books.”

6. The publishing ledger: £10K-plus in royalties versus RMB80 per 1,000 characters

• 吴晨’s positive example was a former colleague’s The Victorian Internet, a book about the telegraph that was selected for recommended reading in British high schools and became a long seller. It generates more than £10K in annual royalties. The central question of a healthy ecosystem, he said, should be stated without euphemism: how much money does the author make from a book?
• The negative example is the current translation market: roughly RMB80 per 1,000 characters. A 100K-plus-character book leaves the translator with just over RMB10K—“less than we’d make writing an article.” Then the same readers complain that translated foreign books are unreadable. “If you pay just over RMB10K for someone to produce an entire book, can you really guarantee the quality?”
• He also ran the numbers for consumers: “The most expensive part of buying a book is your time.” A book priced at RMB100 takes 2-3 days to finish. One idea that followed was to make books free to read, then let readers donate according to the value they received, with government matching funds. Another distinction: “Unless you want to show off by saying that the Twenty-Four Histories sits on our wall, that isn’t buying books. That’s interior decoration.”

7. E-commerce killed bookstores—and publishers supplied the weapon

• 罗叔’s most uncomfortable truth was that “publishers themselves kicked bookstores out of this ecosystem.” When he went to stock books, a major publisher told him directly: “罗老师, don’t go to our marketing department. Go to our e-commerce department; they can give you better prices.” New releases were launched online at less than half price. In some overseas markets, new books cannot go online for a set period.
• 吴晨 followed by saying, “E-commerce killed the physical bookstore scene, and it didn’t just kill bookstores—it killed almost every physical store.” He called it a prisoner’s dilemma, using 徐峥’s decision to move Lost in Thailand to Douyin as an example: refusing to do so could mean huge losses, while doing it would bring condemnation from the entire industry. 馋虫 added that people have difficulty refusing a windfall when it arrives, while the cost registers only with a delay: “When you first start wearing high heels, you are definitely the most beautiful.”
• 馋虫 drew the same lesson from the food industry. He had just returned from Yiwu’s industrial belt, where pricing pressure was “falling toward the very top of the industry like a row of dominoes.” At the end of the race to the bottom, “the middlemen are not hurt—they can sell to anyone.” Factories get no money, consumers get no good products, and the structure is identical to the predicament facing publishers, authors and readers.

8. 罗叔’s postmortem: influencer appeal multiplied by books equals 25%; readers do not go to bookstores

• In 2018, 罗叔 entered the hybrid-bookstore business and pushed influencer check-ins to the extreme, installing a 2-meter-high sculpture and attracting officials who wanted to visit “the most beautiful bookstore in China.” He eventually learned the difference between traffic and conversion: “Buzz does not matter to physical retail. If you attract people with good looks, they come to take photos.”
• The fatal math was simple: “The book attribute accounts for 50%, the influencer attribute accounts for 50%. Added together, that is not 100%—it is 25%. Impressions work through multiplication; the two sides weaken each other’s necessity.”
• The most painful realization was this: “People who read do not go to bookstores.” Those who go are paying for “their time in the bookstore and the journey to get there.” “A bookstore is a place where everyone is an I-person, but they embrace one another with their backs … spending this stretch of time alone but fulfilled.” The bookstore therefore converges on the coffee shop: “It sells time and tables. Many study rooms survived, but bookstores all died. Bookstores across China are dying while coffee shops keep opening.”
• The logic needs to be reversed: do not turn a bookstore into a coffee shop; “embed culture and books into an existing consumption scene.” 罗叔 once designed 6 customer journeys, mapping what visitors saw at the entrance, what they smelled and which violin they heard. “But if your underlying logic is wrong—if your objective is to sell products—you get everything wrong. Offline businesses need to be the newest, most human, most worthwhile destinations people will make a trip to visit.”

9. Cost breakdown: operating a free study room in China’s busiest location

• The hard numbers: a 1,000-square-meter bookstore received RMB60K-RMB120K in monthly subsidies from “the relevant authorities,” after certain issues dragged on for 2-3 years. But “any business that relies on subsidies is wrong.” Subsidies are supposed to buy reputation, traffic and influence; “you didn’t get any of those.”
• The biggest cost was neither books, which could be kept out of inventory, nor equipment, which could remain light—“a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner only needs a bucket to open a clinic.” It was rent. A bookstore has to be on a busy street in a busy district, with light and ventilation, while air conditioning, dehumidifiers and lights run continuously. “It’s basically opening a free study classroom in the busiest place in all of China.” The conflict is impossible to resolve. 罗叔 even calculated that charging one power bank consumed 2 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
• The professional manager’s self-critique: “People who love books should buy books, not open bookstores.” And: “Never ignore questions of technique and method because you have moved yourself. Everything in the world has a solution, but moving yourself is not one of them.”

10. What Germany’s bookstore density says about national mindset and e-commerce timing

• Materials researched by 卫诗婕 show that Germany has more bookstores than any other country in the world. She attributed the background to the reading movement, offline reading salons and reading economy that emerged in Germany after the French Revolution, as well as the West’s recognition of intellectual property. The underlying contrast is captured by Nietzsche: if you love a book, you must buy and own it. China has the opposite tradition: “A book cannot be read unless it is borrowed.”
• Another factor is timing. 卫诗婕 believes many parts of Europe and the US were still in the Amazon era before China’s internet entrepreneurs entered the market. Some people had not yet developed the habit of shopping through apps, so physical retail may not have taken the same hit—although the shock is now arriving, driven in part by aggressive Chinese competition.
• 吴晨 added historical depth. Before 1949, educated people were respected: 鲁迅, an essayist, could live in a 4-story villa. The PRC then broadened access to reading by bringing book prices down from a level affordable only to the wealthy. Now that people are richer, China needs to rebuild the instinct to pay for “the joy of knowledge and reading.” Price sensitivity around RMB20-RMB100 should not constrain the middle class. “A book should at least not be cheaper than Pop Mart.”

11. Rank the problems: not reading is the root, and the solution is a marathon-style mindset revolution

• 吴晨 insisted on ranking the issues first: is the fact that people do not read the biggest problem? He contrasted a goal of 10 books per person per year with a market that amounts to only 1.5 books, arguing that the latter remains a very small market. Combined with the e-commerce price war, it creates a double bind.
• His model for a solution is the marathon. Changes in middle-class health consciousness in the US in the 1970s and in China around 2005 drove the entire sports-consumption industry. Reading works the same way: “Finishing 100 books is like running a marathon. Once you reach that level, you find it hard to tolerate not running.” What is needed is “a revolution” and positive feedback fast enough to reinforce the habit.
• 卫诗婕 argued that readers should not be measured only by volume, but also by “what form of entertainment comes to mind first when you have free time.” “When everyone is scrolling Douyin, books will definitely not sell.” 馋虫 compared reading with typing and handwriting: the people who truly write by hand today are calligraphers, treating it as art or training. If reading becomes similarly niche, “once the market gets smaller, the business model will inevitably have to be rebuilt.”

12. AI and short video: whose books are being summarized, and why the climb cannot be replaced

• 馋虫 is relatively bearish over a 10-year horizon. Multi-turn generative AI interactions can make you “feel as if you know the book inside out, and even go out and fool people by saying you’ve read it.” High-quality UP creators can explain an entire book in 30 minutes, with rich bullet-chat interaction that can feel “even more complete.” The three effects are to divert attention, provide a seemingly more efficient alternative and “push our patience threshold to the limit.” His consensus with media friends is that “since short video arrived, the national IQ has broadly declined.” He also believes the deterioration in income at the source of publishing will lower the average quality of books worth reading.
• 吴晨 brought the discussion back to creators. Bilibili creators who explain and summarize books cannot make money. “If nobody writes books anymore, whose books will you summarize?” He believes copyright litigation is one reason comparable problems have been less severe overseas.
• 罗叔 delivered the episode’s high point in defense of books. AI will solve information and knowledge, but “the struggles that happen between you and a book as you make your way toward an answer give you the detailed experience of observing the world and coming into contact with it.” On One Hundred Years of Solitude, he said: “It uses magical realism to write reality, and it is more real than magical realism. The reality we live in now is more magical than magical realism. You cannot feel that by listening to it in one sitting. Once you have climbed through it yourself, it is like a sequence in your genes imprinted on your body.” “Literature does not die. It transcends eras and lifetimes—that is the best cosmetic surgery.”
• He also called on books to abandon their superiority complex. The hierarchy that equates “not reading with being uncultured” should be dismantled. His challenge to everyone who produces content: “What kind of gift have you ultimately given someone? Courage, energy—those are good things. If they were already in pain and you simply made them hurt more satisfyingly … how can you still call yourself a reader?”

13. The bookstore of the future: forward warehouses, AI and a human touch; the medium determines the content

• 卫诗婕’s vision is a bookstore that does not need to be large, only extremely segmented and personalized. A large model could sit behind the owner’s taste and perform targeted curation, paired with “human” service. Books would be displayed through a forward-warehouse model with zero inventory: see one you want, order it, and have it shipped from elsewhere.
• 吴晨’s bigger idea is that in 3-5 years everyone will have an AI assistant that diagnoses what they are missing against a curriculum and recommends “a passage” each day rather than an entire book. The key insight is that “the medium itself determines the content.” Soap operas emerged because daytime television, housewives and advertisers came first. Popular Western authors may have only 10K words of real content but expand it to 100K words to publish a book. “That is why book interpretation works so well; after reading the interpretation, it may be enough.” The question is how changing media can create sustainable demand for new knowledge, with people willing to create it and people willing to pay for it.
• 罗叔 poured cold water on the premise: “We have no way to make people who do not read start reading.” He had tried every themed format—mystery, archaeology and history—but “none of them brought more people into the room. The people who liked those things were already here.” Publishers are currently translating bestsellers as premium hardcovers at an average price above RMB60, pushing readers toward older editions priced around RMB20. The bookstore’s only meaning is “to give books another chance. One day, when there is no offline chance, people will have even fewer opportunities to see books. That is all.”

14. Q&A lightning round: no opening for secondhand books, Paris’s citywide signal, 读库 and WeChat Reading

• The closure wave is no surprise. 罗叔 said “all bookstores are going to close” and noted that “鸟叔,” without deep pockets, would close, as would “鸟屋.” 西西弗 is closing too, because it still follows the traditional bookstore-plus-coffee format.
• Paris is different at the root. 罗叔 believes Parisians read both for inner satisfaction and to “put on airs,” and that “French people are particularly willing to pay for spiritual consumption.” There is a public reading library roughly every 200 meters. “Everywhere in the city sends the same signal: reading is good for your mind and body.” Used books are still relatively expensive because Paris’s love of vintage is “almost obsessive.”
• Secondhand bookstores in China have “no chance whatsoever.” 罗叔 says Chinese consumers have a debuff when it comes to used books—“you turn the pages and suddenly there’s a grain of rice”—while 多抓鱼 can only replenish its cash through markets. The core logic is that a market is not a bookstore: many people “pick up a book, take a photo with it and put it back.” Libraries do not pay rent, receive subsidies and do not need to make money. 吴晨 added that “the pressure of whether authors can make money should not all be placed on bookstores.”
• The closing questions covered 读库, which combines a blind-box experience with subscriptions and is worth seeing more of, although ISBN review cycles—sometimes taking a year—make magazine-like content difficult to produce; 罗叔 believes more pocket-sized books could be made in the future. WeChat Reading’s advantage is that “reading is no longer something you do alone.” On age and reading, 吴晨 said a person who has built the habit keeps enriching their knowledge system with every new point, while someone without the habit may have their time taken over by other things. 卫诗婕 said reading has become a reward she gives herself: “The more you read, the more you know how ignorant you are; there is so much more world out there. Life gets happier as it grows broader.” She closed with a female writer’s line: “She only feels whole when she is alone”—and the same is true if you replace being alone with reading.