I woke up yesterday morning to hear from the radio it was World Book and Copyright Day. I thought to myself: What's the point? Are people supposed to read and buy books on this particular day that falls every Sunday before May Day just like consumers buying and sending each other gifts of expensive moon cakes on Mid-Autumn Day, for instance?

I was right to be suspicious of yet another day of supposedly international celebration being imposed upon us; the radio news bulletin was followed by a long torrent of bookstore commercials. It seemed every major bookstore in town was offering a discount of 10 to 20 per cent.

Competition, though sometimes not acknowledged in a straightforward way, is a good thing after all. For it is common knowledge that whenever a sales campaign begins, it betrays a building pressure felt by its instigators.

What else can you expect from an industry which sees many old publishing houses hanging on to piles of unsold inventory from the era of the planned economy?

Many companies will have to learn soon enough, like their State-sector counterparts in other industries, to race against not just one another, but to tackle unprecedented rivalry from competitors from the private sector and from overseas. The Chinese market is already officially open to foreign distributors.

A recently published research paper shows that the Chinese publishing industry is much larger than other industries in the media sector. With total sales of 115.5 billion yuan (US$14 billion), books made up 36 per cent of China's media revenue except for that of the Internet, according to researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

But like elsewhere in the market, not all competitors choose the winner's way. In a market that is still in the process of opening up, competition can be tricky. And the "healthy development" of an industry, a phrase that pops up in every debate in the Chinese press, can be difficult.

Sometimes the tactics used can be wrong. For instance, the promotional media generated for the so-called World Book and Copyright Day included some alleged experts (whose names didn't ring a bell with me) being quoted as saying that only by reading the printed book, rather than reading online, can one really digest the thinking part of it.

In other words, you probably won't achieve much in keeping your brain sharp by spending so many hours reading and surfing on the Internet. This is nonsense. It seems to indicate that these "experts" have no idea just how many successful writers keep blogs, and that the Internet plays host to lively debates on everything from politics to literature.

Needless to say such sales talk reveals the fear of an old industry, which has never learned much about competition, being challenged by a new and more interesting rival.

The fact is, according to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the population has shown a continuous declining interest in reading (that is, reading printed material).

Of China's literate population, the percentage of those who claimed to have read at least one book went down from 60.4 per cent in 1999 to 54.2 per cent in 2001, followed by 51.7 per cent in 2003, and then 48.7 per cent in 2005.

In contrast, figures for those opting to read online have increased from 3.7 per cent in 1999 to 18.3 per cent in 2003, and then to 27.8 per cent in 2005 when the nation's population of Internet users exceeded 100 million.

What the publishing industry should do is reorganize their business and expand into the online medium, rather than waging a fruitless war against it.

Plenty of bitter lessons about refusing to recognize the future of a new mode of communication can be found in the many books published on business management. Perhaps it is time for the publishers of these books to read, and seriously digest, the thinking of what they have published.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/24/2006 page4)