Booksellers suffer from lifestyle change

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 (崔靜萍), marketing manager at Kingstone Bookstore (金石堂書店), a book retailer in Taiwan with 113 outlets.

Tsui's comments came after the Chinese-language Common Wealth (天下雜誌) magazine released a poll on Thursday, saying that Taiwanese spend only 7.5 hours a week reading on average, and of the 70 percent that do buy books, they spend less than NT$5,000 a year on reading materials.

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 (農學社).

"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 (光復書局), which controls 14 percent of the textbook retail market, reportedly bounced checks worth NT$18 million in early November. Four of its five stores were subsequently shut down and 100 employees were laid off, Wong Ah-yau (黃亞友), marketing manager of the company said yesterday.

Chinshow Publishing Group (錦繡文化), established in 1981 and a publisher of the Chinese-language National Geographic magazine (國家地理雜誌), also encountered a financial crisis in July when one of its subsidiaries ran short on cash and was unable to make good on NT$60 million in debts. It has transferred the magazine to another publisher, Choice Publishing Co (秋雨文化).