One for the books

Sales go up in China, driven by e-commerce and demand for textbooks and educational literature, Xing Yi reports. 

Educational books and textbooks dominated China's online book sales in 2018, thanks to the convenience brought about by the country's booming e-commerce, according to industry reports.

China's overall book market in 2018 reached a value of 89.4 billion yuan ($13.22 billion), up 11.3 percent from 2017, according to an annual report released by the Beijing-based research firm, Openbook, on Jan 9.

The increase was driven by the surge in online sales, which grew by 24.7 percent from the previous year to reach 57.3 billion yuan, while sales at brick-and-mortar stores dropped by 6.69 percent year-on-year, says the report.

In other reports jointly released by Openbook and e-commerce company JD, in December, the top two best-selling categories on the latter's platform were children's books, which accounted for 24.5 percent of sales, and textbooks, reference books and test guides that came in second, making for 18.7 percent of the company's book sales.

In general, the reports says men bought more books pertaining to job training and certificate tests, while women bought more books on early childhood education and young adult education.

"Men buy books for themselves, while women buy books for their offspring," says Openbook's research manager Feng Xiaohui.

Similar findings were reported by e-commerce platforms that are actively involved in book sales, such as Dangdang and Alibaba's Tmall and Taobao.

Alibaba registered an increase of more than 30 million buyers purchasing books on its e-commerce platforms, with 5.5 being the average number of printed books bought per customer, according to a report issued by the e-commerce giant on Jan 8.

The majority of online buyers were young with three quarters of them aged below 40, according to the report.