Taiwanese booksellers are suffering the financial fallout of changing consumer reading habits, industry officials said yesterday.
"The number of visitors to our stores are obviously dropping as many people prefer to surf the Internet or play computer games, rather than dropping by the bookstores to read," said Tracy Tsui (
Tsui's comments came after the Chinese-language Common Wealth (
Of the 1,093 respondents to the survey, the most popular leisure activity in Taiwan is "watching TV", followed by "outdoor activities" and "exercise". Reading ranks the fourth on the list.
Tsui said the company did not expect to meet their 2002 revenue forecast of NT$3.2 billion, citing both the economic downturn and also the changing habits on Taiwanese readers.
Kingstone cut its plan to open 10 stores this year in half after opening 10 stores last year.
Taiwan's 50-store Eslite Corp (誠品) said it has adjusted downward its growth forecast from 10 percent to 8 percent this year, with annual revenue rising a mere NT$500 million from NT$3.7 billion in 2001 to NT$4.2 billion this year, said Nina Lee (李玉華), a marketing manager for Eslite.
Beyond the big bookstore chains, small bookstores, distributors and publishers were also hit by the slump as the market shrunk by 20 percent, according to Taiwan's largest book distributor, Nung Hsueh Co (
"The sluggish economy and change in reading habits resulted in a shutdown of many traditional small bookstores and 16 distributors," a Nung Hsueh official, surnamed Huang, yesterday told the Taipei Times.
With distributors acting as middleman between publishers and small book stores, many retailers have found survival difficult. Meanwhile, the big chains purchase directly from publishers.
"As the margin on books is cut thin by the distributors, these bookstores cannot compete with large book retailers and are forced to go out of business," he said.
Tough times abound. Fourteen-year-veteran textbook seller, Kuang Fu Group (
Chinshow Publishing Group (
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last