Recently, Dongfang Selection launched a one-yuan book selling activity, which caused heated discussions among netizens.
It is understood that on December 26, Oriental Selection launched the "New Year's gifts, 5,000 good books for 1 yuan collar" activity, and members of Oriental Selection can buy books at 1 yuan ** in the event, limited to 5,000 copies.
According to feedback from netizens, the books snapped up include Yu Minhong's "My 2022: Yu Minhong's New Essay Collection", Zhou Chenggang's "New Oriental Goes Away: An Educational Quest Through the World", etc., as well as public books such as "Siddhartha" and "Wuthering Heights".
Although New Oriental said that it was giving back to netizens and making profits in order to let netizens buy books, all parties had different opinions on this.
In the eyes of Dongfang Selection member users, this is a very common "wool picking" activity, the purpose of which is to attract traffic to Dongfang's own APP. Some users posted Yu Minhong's writings that they received for 1 yuan, indicating that the event was a benefit rather than a sale.
In the eyes of merchants, a symbolic charge of 1 yuan is equivalent to a free book, and it should not be criticized for taking the courier fee.
However, people in the publishing industry believe that books should not be "sold cheaply", which destroys the ecology of the book publishing industry, makes book publishing fall into a vicious circle of low-price competition, disrupts the business development order of the book publishing industry, and tramples on knowledge.
Photo source @ Han Haoyue
Some netizens also believed: "The low price of one yuan has exceeded a reasonable preferential range, and for the normal publishing and book industry, such a method is malicious competition", "Selling books for one yuan has also played a bad role in the book industry, harming the interests of authors, editors, publishers, sales and other personnel." Some netizens borrowed Dong Yuhui's famous saying "Gu is cheap and hurts farmers" to oppose the act of selling books at low prices, calling "books cheap and hurting people".
In fact, in the e-commerce industry, selling books at low prices is not new, and it has also caused a wide range of discussions before.
On September 27, 2021, Internet celebrity anchor Liu Yuanyuan opened a special live broadcast of 100 million yuan, claiming to "call half of the Chinese publishing house", and indicated in the preview that 500,000 books with a price of less than 10 yuan and 100,000 books of 1 yuan were prepared.
According to statistics, in the first half of Liu Yuanyuan's live broadcast room, a total of 124 books and entertainment products were put on the shelves, of which 58 products were priced below 10 yuan in the live broadcast room, accounting for nearly 50%.
1 yuan to grab a book. A warm-up slogan for live streaming has stung many publishers, once triggering "whether books should be sold at a low price and whether knowledge can be sold at a low price......"Controversy.
The book industry obviously does not agree with such a low level of goods**, especially Internet celebrity anchors to bring goods. You know, the pit fees and commissions of many well-known anchors are not low, so where do the profits of the publishing house come from?
Some insiders once said that for live broadcasts, the cost includes the copyright and printing cost of the book itself, the cost of logistics, the anchor's commission share, the expenditure of customer service manpower, etc., no matter how it is calculated, it is difficult to calculate how the genuine book below 10 yuan has a profit margin, let alone a 1 yuan book, even if it is to go to inventory, you need to pay a logistics cost of 3 yuan to 5 yuan.
In the middle of this year, Zhuozhou, Hebei Province, was hit by floods caused by heavy rains caused by typhoons, and many publishing institutions with book warehouses in this place suffered heavy losses, and the books in the warehouses could only be disposed of as scrap. This brings back the fact that the publishing industry is in a difficult situation.
With the rise of digital reading, the book publishing industry has been reduced to a "classical" industry in some program, and in recent years, the sales and profits of the book publishing industry have generally declined. The epidemic has put the physical bookstore market in a "cold winter" state for three yearsA flood has dealt a heavy blow to individual book platforms and publishing houses. It is pointed out that the entire publishing industry is a huge and complex industrial chain, and e-commerce's "low-price book sales" seems to be only one of the small links, but it will inevitably be transmitted to other links in the entire chain. "There will be no pie in the sky", someone benefits, someone must pay for it, if the payer has been silent, paying, sacrificing, then no one will ever see behind the "sales carnival", those who suffer losses, what is suffering.
No e-commerce platform should sell books at a low price as a drainage product.
According to the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Publishing Industry" (hereinafter referred to as the "Plan") released by the National Press and Publication Administration, which mentions plans to promote the formulation of relevant laws and regulations, including the "book legislation" that has been proposed by industry insiders for many years.
The plan mentioned the content of the vicious war, expressed the position to strengthen the supervision and management of publications, promote the legislation, effectively stop the vicious "war" of online and offline publication sales, and create a healthy and orderly market environment.
What do you think about selling books at low prices?