2009 Beijing Ditan Winter Book Fair closes

On December 14, the 11-day-long 2009 Beijing Ditan Winter Book Fair closed, which was attended by about 300,000 readers. The number (300,000), however, is nearly half of that in 2008: 500,000 readers attended the book fair in 2008.

Over 200 publishers, as well as the Xinhua Bookstore, got together during this book fair, offering the lowest ever prices for the event. For example, the Beijing Youth Bookstore partnered with various publishers to set up a special stall to sell inventory, offering the lowest prices this year with a discount of 90 percent off. On the first day of the fair, Xinhua Bookstore, which always offers a 20 percent discount on their books, set up a striking sign: 50 percent off, and 90 to 80 percent off for some books near the end of the fair. Chang Liyong, who is in charge of the book fair, said that some state-owned publishers cleared out their inventory largely because they are set to be restructured at the end of the year, as well as other reasons.

The 11-day-long the winter book fair  atracted a  great number of residents

After paying several visits to the book fair, the reporter found that though fashion and sports performances and other activities were held at the fair for the first time, adolescent readers showed little enthusiasm for the fair, despite the fair's theme of an "adolescent learning festival," because of few new book types, little publicity and various new ways to buy books, and in the end about 70 percent readers who attended the fair were middle-aged and elderly people. "There is a library at school, and I read online books most of the time. If books are ordered online, they will be delivered to my home. It is very convenient. It takes much trouble to carry books during the cold winter." Zhuo Yi, a post-90s student, said that he came to the book fair with his classmates mainly to buy rare picture storybooks. Zhao Wei, a sophomore at Capital Normal University, is from Beijing. He said that "most of my schoolmates from other regions even do not know that the book fair exists."

Because a few adolescent readers were attracted, half of a stall that was originally meant to sell cartoons and other adolescent books was used to sell cross-stitch patterns that are popular with the middle-aged and elderly people. Many booksellers said that the middle-aged and elderly people always bought the cheap books, so sales were not good.

In the face of the challenge of losing adolescent readers to online shopping, online books and other new ways of buying books, the organizing committee of the Ditan book fair is confronted with a new problem: injecting new life into the traditional book fair. Chang said that more measures will be taken in 2010 to attract more readers. In addition, the organizing committee has contacted Beijing Public Transport Holdings Ltd. in an attempt to open dedicated bus lines to the book fair in 2010 to facilitate book buying in the winter. Rather than releasing information only three days before the book fair kicked off as it did this year, the organizing committee will start its publicity campaign in advance and strengthen the publicity at colleges and universities.