Tianwen Bookstore’s library construction plan across the country was completed before the end of last year. It is a very remarkable achievement to complete the construction of more than 3,000 libraries in more than two years.
Therefore, Tianwen Bookstore has replaced Xinhua Bookstore as the largest book supplier in the country, and this is not their end, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the future.
Because the cities across the country are not very big now, Tianwen libraries are basically built in old cities. They also need to build Tianwen libraries in new cities.
In fact, the construction of Tianwen Library has been included in the new city construction plan of China Housing Corporation. The China Housing Corporation has unified planning, and Tianwen Library participated in the design and funded the construction.
At that time, in addition to the county town which is basically a Tianwen Library, cities such as prefecture-level cities and above will build two or more libraries based on the city area, population size, etc.
By then, the number of Tianwen libraries will reach about 4,000, and a nationwide library management system will be established to improve the convenience of people's access to books and improve their reading level.
Tianwen Bookstore actually knows that electronic reading will gradually become the mainstream reading method in the future, especially young people, and the time they spend reading on paper will be greatly reduced.
But Tianwen Library is not just for profit. Every library full of art and culture stands in the city, bringing great cultural and artistic influence to local residents.
This can be seen from relevant data. Before Tianwen Library existed, the reading situation of citizens in various places was actually very poor. Only professionals had better reading habits.
However, since the Tianwen Library was built, it has gradually become a well-known local check-in place. Although it does not necessarily take too long to read every day, the number of readings has indeed increased significantly.
More importantly, the experience level of people participating in reading has shown a clear downward trend, which shows that people who originally did not read books very much or who had difficulty obtaining books through effective channels are increasingly liking this way of reading and leisure.
In the operation of Tianwen Library, Tianwen Book Club is also increasingly emphasizing the reading experience. It is not just a place to buy and borrow books, but also allows readers to have a very different experience reading in Tianwen Library and reading at home. degree increased significantly.
Just operating books is destined to be a loss-making business. Both Zhao Yi and Tianwen Book Club understood this from the beginning, so they never planned to make much money from it.
Tianwen Library’s current income sources mainly come from the following aspects:
The first one is responsible for the sales of compulsory education and higher education textbooks across the country. This can be regarded as replacing part of the original responsibilities of Xinhua Bookstore and accounting for a large proportion of Tianwen Library's operating income.
This is possible mainly due to several aspects. The first is that Tianwen Library’s network is much stronger than the current Xinhua Bookstore. It is spread all over the country. Tianwen Library distributes textbooks and the distribution speed is faster.
Secondly, although China Education Corporation is responsible for national education welfare, it is still a private enterprise in the final analysis. It is normal to hand over some business to its brother companies under reasonable circumstances.
Anyway, someone has to be responsible for this business. This is a way for Chinese education companies to keep their money from outsiders. Anyway, their losses have nothing to do with other institutions. They are all taken care of by Zhao Yilai.
Therefore, no one else can tell whether this business is handed over to Tianwen Library. It cannot be thought that they are transferring their own interests. Moreover, the Ministry of Education is also responsible for pricing textbooks.
As for the sale of higher education textbooks, only some, not all, are sold, and this is not something China Education Company specifically asked Tianwen Library to do. China Education Company does not care about the higher education textbooks.
The reason why this can be achieved is mainly because the teaching materials of major colleges and universities across the country basically use the higher education teaching materials originally written by Zhao Yi for Tianwen University.
Although it does not involve particularly advanced knowledge, it is very well written and easy to understand, making it the best among all undergraduate textbooks. Therefore, major universities have also introduced undergraduate textbooks from Tianwen University.
As for the teaching materials at the postgraduate level, they are not so unified. After all, the postgraduate stage involves deeper learning, and the education methods of each university are different. The teaching materials may even be compiled by the instructors themselves.
The undergraduate textbooks of Tianwen University are all published by Tianwen University's own publishing house, and then handed over to Tianwen Library as the exclusive agent. Other schools can only purchase them through Tianwen Library.
These books are clearly priced, and the price is the same across the country. Major universities have no objection to purchasing these higher education textbooks from Tianwen Library.
The second part is their comprehensive business model, which has been discussed in some previous chapters. By expanding the business scope, they can achieve more revenue.
However, not all Tianwen libraries across the country are consistent in this area, and the content of their operations is likely to change greatly and is not static, and this type of operation is purely commercial.
For example, if you wanted to listen to music before, you could only buy tapes or CDs. Therefore, Tianwen Library's music record distribution business is actually quite profitable.
But now that Internet music players have appeared, more and more consumers will choose to download music resources directly from the Internet in the future, reducing their reliance on physical music carriers.
Therefore, the music record distribution business may be reduced in the future, although this business will not be completely eliminated. After all, there are still some people who like to collect physical records.
But the music bar business can last for a long time, because ordinary people cannot afford high-end sound systems, and the same song played by low-end sound systems and high-end sound systems sounds completely different.
This will allow people who like music to come to the music bar during their leisure time, order a drink and listen to music quietly, or two good friends from Yue San will come here to share music-related things, etc.
Whether you are catching up with friends or spending time alone, music bars are a good place to go. If you have music you like, you can also choose to buy physical records for your collection.
In fact, it can be seen from the sales of Polaris' CD music players that today's consumers' love for physical records has not completely disappeared.
After the release of Polaris' MP3 players, global CD shipments still exceed 10 million units each year. However, due to the small stock of CD music players in China, this time it has become the largest independent sales market.
Because the income of domestic people was low in the past, few ordinary people could afford expensive CD music players. Now that everyone's income has increased, the number of people buying CD music players has gradually increased.
More importantly, Polaris' CD music player is actually better than MP3 in listening to music. For people who are strict about the sound and quality of music, CD music players are their best choice.
Since the library is a large venue, it will also be open to commercial operations in the future. Various exhibition activities can be held in Tianwen Library.
The third is the financial management of membership deposits. If you want to apply for a membership card at Tianwen Library, you must pay a deposit of 100 yuan, and readers can borrow books of about 50 yuan. The deposit will be paid when you cancel your membership. Return to the reader.
Although a single fee is not much, if there are 100 million members across the country, then there will be a cash pool of 10 billion yuan, and this money can be used for some financial investment operations, which can bring a certain amount of income to Tianwen Library every year .
The fourth is book borrowing income, which includes physical book borrowing income and e-book subscription income. Currently, physical book borrowing income is more, and e-book subscription income is less.
The fifth is book sales revenue, which is also one of the original intentions of Tianwen Bookstore when it established Tianwen Library, because Tianwen Bookstore is now the largest book manufacturer in the country.
If you don't master your own sales channels, many things will be difficult to handle. Adding some idealistic ideas led to the establishment of the Tianwen Library project.
These various methods are not for the purpose of making much money, but for the purpose of maintaining the normal operation of Tianwen Library and not losing money. It would be better if a certain profit can be achieved.
Originally, the purpose of the construction of Tianwen Library was not a purely commercial activity. On the one hand, it was to facilitate Tianwen Bookstore to spread its channels throughout the country, and on the other hand, it was to improve residents' reading abilities and habits.
Judging from the operating conditions of astronomy libraries in less than two years, many libraries have achieved the goal of operating balance, but it is still very difficult to recover costs. We hope to have better performance in the future.
Now Tianwen Library is working hard to digitize the books in its library, and is also building its own online book sales system to fully realize the Internet transformation.
Although Shangtong Trading Company's online sales platform also has its own book sales business, it is a comprehensive platform after all, and the types of books it operates are not as comprehensive and professional as those of Tianwen Library.
In the future, Tianwen Library's online book sales system will specialize in books, music, peripherals and other businesses, and will also embed their vertically segmented online sales system into Shangtong Trading Company's e-commerce platform.
At that time, Shangtong Trading Company’s online book business will no longer need to stock and operate its own books. They will only serve as a sales platform channel and only charge 5% of the platform fee. Everything else can be left to Tianwen Books. The museum itself is responsible.
Now that the Tianwen Library has been built, the next step will be to extend this channel and build a community reading room. This plan will take more time to complete.
Not everyone is willing to take transportation to travel so far to read in the library or to save money. In order to facilitate residents' reading, the community book reading room was born.
However, both Zhao Yi and Tianwen Publishing House feel that this work is necessary, but how to do it and to what extent it can be done are not yet particularly clear.
Therefore, in this area, we will not take very radical measures. We will first select communities with various characteristics to conduct experiments to see how the operations are going, sum up experience, and then formulate specific business strategies.
The business activities of Tianwen Publishing House have also been greatly expanded, presenting a diversified business model, and are no longer the previous pure book publishing business activities.
The first is their top academic journal business, which has developed greatly last year. Due to Zhao Yi’s incident last year, their top academic journals have gained wider recognition internationally.
Although their top academic journals are all published in Chinese, it does not prevent global academic institutions from purchasing them. At worst, they can just buy them and then translate them. Those who do science are not short of money, and the cost of translation can still be afforded.
Even scholars and professors who still have some spare time have begun to learn some Chinese. Chinese may be a bit difficult for ordinary people and takes a very long time, but for top smart people, the difficulty of learning will be greatly reduced.
It’s just that there was no reason for them to learn Chinese in our country before. At that time, our country’s academic level was not high, and good papers were all published in English, so there was no need for them to learn Chinese at all.
Nowadays, there have been great changes. There is one company that stubbornly publishes top-level papers in Chinese, and it has received widespread support from domestic academic circles.
The problem is that the academic papers they publish are of very high value and are even ahead of foreign scientific research in some fields. This has to force them to pay attention to and learn from our academic results.
To be honest, as long as these experts and scholars start learning Chinese, Zhao Yi's battle for academic discourse power has already taken the first step.
With my country’s excellent cultural genes, learning Chinese is a process of accepting Chinese culture and strengthening these experts and scholars’ identification with Chinese culture.
In addition, our country's economy is developing rapidly, and academic research work has also been greatly improved. If we introduce these experts and scholars in the future, it will be seamless, and they will be able to adapt to the domestic environment.
In the past, the top journals of Tianwen Publishing House were comprehensive journals. Now as the research in various fields in our country becomes more comprehensive and in-depth, it is imperative to build a purer branch journal.
However, we have not taken action yet. We are just planning and communicating with relevant government departments, universities and academic research institutions in order to reach a new consensus.
The reason why Tianwen Publishing House is able to produce top academic journals is not because Tianwen Publishing House is so powerful, but because it has received unanimous support from all over the country.
Of course, Tianwen Bookstore’s doing this is also a state of payment, because Tianwen Bookstore does not charge any fees from contributors. These fees are completely borne by Tianwen Bookstore. This is very different from the previous life where you can publish if you have money and connections. .
The purpose of this is to return academic purity and avoid various academic chaos in previous lives. Treating academic journals as a business is not a good idea, at least that's how Zhao Yi sees it.
After the sub-journal system was established, Tianwen Publishing House officially established an entire journal operation system. The top comprehensive journals are first-class journals, and they are top-notch papers carefully selected from each branch.
The branch journals are classified according to disciplines and publish domestic academic papers with important influence in these disciplines. The quality may not be as good as the top comprehensive journals, but they must also have very high technical content.
As for those lower-level papers, the electronic journals established by Tianwen Publishing House will not exclusively publish paper journals, because these papers do not need to use precious paper journal slots.
Electronic journals are also divided into two levels. The first level is of certain value, but not groundbreaking. The data in it has high citation value.
These types of papers are better papers selected from the entire electronic paper library, and have certain reference value for professional title ratings in academia. In fact, most people in China can only publish papers of this level.
The remaining electronic papers that have not been selected are papers that are valuable but not of much value. If you want to cite the data of such papers, you must think carefully, and they may not be accurate.
Papers at this level are mainly written by some graduate students and individual undergraduates. They are relatively immature papers and can be regarded as giving these backward researchers some opportunities and a platform to publish papers.
Of course, there are also some people who can produce high-level papers while still students, so Tianwenshu Society uses artificial intelligence to screen them, select those with certain value, and then upgrade them to the first category of electronic journals.
In order to strengthen exchanges in academic circles, break the limitations of research institutions themselves, and carry out cross-institutional research cooperation, Tianwen Publishing House has also developed its own academic exchange platform.
The users on this platform are all researchers who have been certified by Tianwen Bookstore and have certain basic academic research capabilities. Ordinary people cannot use this communication platform.
Researchers can communicate and discuss a certain issue on this platform. At the same time, they can also find like-minded collaborators on a certain research, collaborate on research projects of common interest, etc.
The second is the magazine business, which is a purely commercial business, mainly involving literary magazines, popular science magazines, fashion magazines and industry magazines.
This business is part of Tianwen Bookstore's diversified operations. It also provides domestic users with a variety of information platforms to enrich people's spiritual lives.
The main reason why Tianwen Book Club wants to bring Tianwen Library business to the community is to operate channels for these magazines so that consumers can purchase these magazines and other reading materials nearby.
Of course, in addition to magazines and other reading materials, community book channels will also operate newspapers distribution and other businesses. As for other businesses, Tianwen Book Company needs to continue to explore.
The third is their book publishing business, which is also the main business of Tianwen Publishing House. Due to its international channels and intelligent translation experts, this business is also the fastest growing.
Now their book publishing business can bring annual revenue of 20 billion yuan to Tianwen Publishing House. It involves many book categories and has great influence internationally.
In particular, their general literary reading business has great development potential and the fastest development speed because they have an artificial intelligence writing system in their hands.
Like other publishing houses that want to publish a series of books, they also need to organize authors or book manuscripts from authors, plus proofreading, etc., which may take a year.
Tianwen Book Club does not need this at all. As long as the content of the series of books is determined, the artificial intelligence writing system can write a complete set in a short time.
Others walk on two legs, but Tianwen Publishing House is directly on the rocket. Naturally, its publishing capabilities far exceed other publishing houses.
Coupled with the excellent artificial intelligence translation system, they can launch books for various countries in a short time, and their annual book export volume has reached a record level.
Although 20 billion yuan seems to be a small amount, it is actually the largest publishing business revenue in the world. The total number of publishers that came into being later may not have so many, and this does not include the teaching aid book business.
However, there is room for improvement in this business. Currently, publishing is aimed at the global market. Zhao Yi hopes that they can implement localized publishing in various countries around the world.
This is very important. Every country has its own cultural traditions and reading preferences. If Tianwen Publishing House can have a deeper understanding, it may earn much more income than it does now.
However, it is not easy to do this well, because it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive study of each country's culture, national character, social concerns, etc., and this work itself is not simple.
Therefore, if you want to do a good job in this business, you must cooperate with domestic social science research institutions, Lime Entertainment's cultural research institutions in various countries, and foreign research institutions to obtain their relevant research results.
Then based on these research results, tentative book publishing will be carried out. Artificial intelligence will be used to analyze relevant data and the experiments will be continuously adjusted to obtain more accurate analysis results.
This gives full play to the analytical capabilities of artificial intelligence. Over time, artificial intelligence may understand the culture of each country better than humans, and even understand our own culture better than the locals.
Therefore, this business does not necessarily require immediate results, but it must be done now, because if you want to have good results, you want to spend a certain amount of time.
The fourth is the online reading platform business. This business has only been developed for about a year, and its development speed is quite rapid. It accounts for a certain proportion of reading in the international market.
However, online reading habits are very different from traditional book reading habits. They are still in the cultivation stage, and good payment habits have not yet been formed.
However, with its large number of free books and relatively comprehensive content, it has attracted the favor of a large number of readers. The entire Tianwen Book Club is still very optimistic about this business.
In addition to using artificial intelligence to write a large number of books on the online reading platform, Tianwen Bookstore has also recruited a large number of domestic authors. However, there are not many responders so far. It can only be said to be a beginning.
Judging from the current payment situation, it is impossible for authors to obtain high income in this area. Many authors actually receive subsidies from Tianwen Publishing House to meet their daily needs. If they want a high income, they still need to pay. The paid business needs to develop.
According to Zhao Yi's plan, the future online reading platform will still be based on artificial intelligence writing, supplemented by manual writing. The speed of manual writing is completely defeated by artificial intelligence.
But it cannot be without human participation, because the participation of these writers can better provide materials and nutrients for artificial intelligence, allowing artificial intelligence to play its role better.
Regardless of the paid income of real writers in the future, Tianwen Publishing House will use part of the income earned from artificial intelligence to subsidize real writers so that they can earn a relatively decent income.
As for the amount of subsidies, it depends on the overall income of the platform. When the income is less like now, the income earned by real writers will naturally be less. (End of chapter)