Cover review| Internet celebrity bookstores are caught in the "tide of store closures", and the revival of physical bookstores has been reversed

Jiang Jingjing

Recently, the Internet celebrity bookstore Yan Ji has once again attracted attention because it is deeply involved in the "closing tide". After closing some stores in Beijing, Xi'an and other cities, Yanji has closed a number of stores in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In the strategic adjustment, it may have been realized that relying on "appearance" alone cannot save physical bookstores, and internet celebrity bookstores cannot only stay in the stage of attracting consumers to take photos and "punch cards", but also have to truly find a sustainable profit model. (Economic Daily)

At a time when traditional bookstores are declining, net red bookstores are rising strongly. The change of old and new was once full of expectations. It's just a pity that with the fall of the speed of light in some head net red bookstores, the way out of the "physical bookstore" has become confused again, and it has vaguely come to the crossroads of fate.

"Face value can't save the physical bookstore", what a painful realization. In this regard, the authorities have realized that in fact, many outsiders have already seen through it. Internet celebrity bookstores have a large flow of people, and there are many people taking photos and punching cards to send circles of friends, but many of them are also "holding personal fields". It's lively, but the conversion rate is extremely low. Many of them are popular bookstores, and the essence belongs to "sightseers", not "consumers", let alone "readers". They consumed the resources of the bookstore and "rubbed a wave", but they did not bring considerable consumption to the bookstore. And this is the direct reason why many internet celebrity bookstores are unsustainable.

Before that, many new bookstores once thought they had found a "business password". The ideal model in its vision is to replace the "wealth password" with a traffic password. In other words, it is to divert the flow with "exquisite decoration" and generate income with "peripheral cultural creation" and "compound management". However, after practice, it is found that the so-called "bookstore cultural creation" does not sell a lot, and as for the salons, lectures, exhibitions and other activities run by bookstores, it is even more "applauded and not applauded". To this day, the fundamental question of bookstore transformation does not have a good answer. That is, when bookstores do not live by "selling books", what can they rely on?

In the context of "reading", especially "serious reading", which is becoming more and more niche, "physical bookstores" are blindly internet celebrities and chains, which is likely to be a crooked road. Of course, we also see some "small and beautiful" embedded bookstores, whose main business has become coffee, milk tea and other drinks; in addition, there are some simple, cold "special bookstores". Its strategy is a return to basics: "selling books" and attracting real readers to buy them. Its core competitiveness is high-quality book selection and quality control, so as to form a differentiation with the public bookstore...

The way out for physical bookstores is by no means internet celebrity. The collapse of some internet celebrity bookstores confirms an indissoluble truth: there is no universal business model, and traditional bookstores do not have a universal "overall transformation" plan, but can only rely on the operator's own trial and error, each breakthrough.