Ronald Reagan once famously dissed environmentalism by quipping, "You've seen one redwood, you've seen 'em all."
I used to feel that way about a certain kind of book retailing: seen one superstore, seen 'em all.
And then I went to China.
On a miserably cold Tuesday afternoon, a guide and translator who goes by the name of Eugene took me to visit a bookstore in Beijing. Riggio brothers, take note: this was no mere superstore; it was more like an ultra-super-duper store: eight floors, more than 2,000 square feet each, crammed with tens of thousands of hardcovers, paperbacks, pamphlets, magazines, as well as some school supplies and, inexplicably, one half-floor-full of musical equipment, from pianos to Chinese flutes. The sheer quantity of stuff was itself overwhelming, but what was truly amazing was this: the place was packed. On a weekday! It wasn't even lunch hour, and the whole place looked like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. What's more, would-be buyers were talking animatedly with what sure seemed to be salespeople, who were animatedly talking back! And there were lines at every cash register of people eager to spend their hard-earned yuan.
It was an incredible sight, second maybe only to the Great Wall itself.
What is it that the Chinese know about publishing and bookselling that we don't? Well, to start with, the country has almost two billion citizens, the vast majority of whom are literate. (We're a meager 300 million with a high but increasingly imperiled literacy rate.) And then, of course, there's the pesky matter of copyright: which is to say that, while the laws are changing, there's plenty of incentive for and evidence of piracy. According to editors at Publishing Today, the Chinese version of PW (and a joint venture with PW's parent company), there are "only" 200,000 books a year published in China. Our much smaller world publishes almost that many—175,000 at last count.
So you can't just do the math here—and even the fact that China has many thousands of years of literary history doesn't completely explain its obvious public appetite for books. Could it be that they make smart publishing decisions and know how to market what they've got? Eugene seemed to think so: he pointed out that almost all of one whole floor was stocked with books on technology, another half floor stuffed with books that teach the Chinese language. "They teach what people want to know," Eugene said. (Fiction editors, take sad note: there were novels and stories here, but while some estimate Chinese publishers import and translate 15 foreign books for every one they export, most of those are from other Asian countries. What Western novels and story collections I saw were mostly classics, and occupied only a small section of one floor.)
But what, I asked Eugene, sells best here. "Look," he said, walking me down the escalator to a half floor of books with covers as unintelligible to me as all the others—and even more populated with shoppers. "This is what we most want."
What were they?
Why, aisles and aisles and aisles of books on something the Chinese obviously consider very, very important, of course: books on how to learn to speak and write the English language.
