State of the Book Nation
A general data dump from China’s book market in 2025, and what it tells us about where, how and what people are reading and buying
People aren’t reading. Books don’t feel relevant. The delayed gratification of a good novel just can’t compete with the endorphin payoff from a viral video. Attention spans have fundamentally changed. University students who once read three books per week now struggle to finish one.
As the UK book trade responds to an existential crisis in reading with a “national year of reading”, publishers in China continue to demonstrate the art of the endless pivot in their search for successful publishing mixes, pricing models, and distribution channels. The numbers overall paint a portrait of a sector struggling to find its way amid declining sales; yet there is an undeniable energy in certain sectors of the book market as publishers continue to go where the eyeballs are.
Here follows a semi-regular look into the trade data from OpenBook, China’s benchmark reporting agency, and a few of my takeaways in terms of the key trends that are emerging.
The Numbers
Retail sales in the world’s second largest book market fell by -2.24% by value and -3.8% by volume in 2025 according to the OpenBook annual report, valuing the overall market at RMB110.4bn (US$16.4bn). There’s not a lot to sugarcoat about the numbers, with the book trade now worth 88% of its prepandemic peak in 2019 and continuing to decline. The figures are based on a calculation of “list price revenue” (LRP), or sales value according to the RRP before any discount, meaning these numbers are what the publishers would have earned in an ideal world and not based on actual receipts - and China’s deeply discounted ecommerce environment is far from any kind of ideal world.
Because Chinese data uses sales associated with ISBNs, digital formats including audiobooks, webtoons, ebooks, and webfiction sit outside of these numbers. For context, other available figures for FY2024 value digital publishing at RMB66.141bn (US$9.62bn), up +16.65% YOY and attracting 670m users. Online literature, meanwhile, was reportedly worth RMB495.5bn (US$72bn) in 2024, up +29.37% YOY, although growth in this area was probably powered by micro-drama adaptations from webfiction optimised for vertical phone screens. [Note: I will put together detailed reports on these dynamic digital formats in the near future.]
From a category point of view, the entire market has been flipped on its head. The highest growth sectors of the past 20yrs (education, literature, supplementary education, narrative non-fiction) all show a sales decline. Sales are booming, meanwhile, for computing and technology (+24.3%), lifestyle (+17.26), psychology & self help (+13.57%), philosophy & Marxist-Leninst thought (+7.24%), and business (+6.21%). After a two-decade bull run that made children’s the largest single category, recent years of falling sales have shown a slight flattening out, growing +1.23% in 2025.
The Where Not the What
There are various drivers behind the shifts in what Chinese people are buying and reading (or not). For the slowdown in children’s publishing, a similar range of factors to western countries are present, with a generation of children turning away from reading for pleasure. Demographics also play a critical role in China: 2025 saw another record low in the country’s birth rate, with 7.92m babies born, down 17% on the previous year. Meanwhile, fewer foreign rights are being bought, and a sense of IP nationalism and moving past a “west-is-best” mindset in parents has made a soft market even softer for international publishers.
The most revealing part of last year’s data however is where people are buying books and the impact of that on the mix of published titles. In 2019, 60% of all book sales happened via online bookstores like Amazon.cn or JD.com; over the following 5yrs that has been slashed almost in half to a paltry 32.37%. In the meantime, content ecommerce channels such as Douyin, China’s TikTok precursor, and RedNote (Xiao Hong Shu) have appeared from left field to gobble up 40.53% of sales by retail value, up +30.43% YOY. This leaves physical bookstores with a mere 13.65% of the market (down -4.63%), alongside specialist ecommerce verticals (13.44%), serving readers seeking parenting advice, inspirational philosophy lectures, or adult English fluency programmes.
For publishers, one obvious impact of the dominance of social ecommerce channels is deep discounts, low price points, and enormous pressure on profit margins for brand new front list titles. Additionally, publishers and authors of previously iron-clad and slow burn publishing (e.g. general fiction and non-fiction) have been forced to completely rethink how they boost flagging sales to cut through and reach a new potential readership.
Some literary publishers choose to sit by and wait for the serendipity of a major influencer to tout a title, sending sales stratospheric (see the evergreen popularity of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude). Other authors and publishers, however, have taken matters into their own hands to reach a new, younger tribe. After a photograph of elder literary statesmen Yu Hua and Nobel laureate Mo Yan went viral rendered as a dog cartoon meme, publisher Duoke seized on the opportunity to re-issue Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (first pub. 2006) and Yu Hua’s On the Road at Seventeen (first pub. 1987), bundled with a limited edition drawstring bag featuring said meme (see photo), and reportedly sold more than 100k sets in the year.
Meanwhile, there has been a clear shift in new titles towards clickable topics that can be clipped, memed, quoted, and shared as bite-sized videos. This means sales of commercial non-fiction have swept the board. There is a clear sense that China has nudged ahead in the race to dominate critical future technologies such as AI, clean energy transitions, EVs, batteries, and advanced robotics, and readers continue to be motivated to learn, read, and understand as much as they can. Additionally, while there is a sense that China has “won” the trade war with the US, a general sense of economic fragility and uncertainty is still present, and sales of psychology, self help, and lifestyle continue to grow.
The impact of social media and virality on sales is clearest in bestseller lists split out between social ecommerce and online bookstores. While fiction lists are similar, in non-fiction, the divergence is clear, with entirely different titles succeeding. The authorised corporate biography of Chinese EV manufacturer BYD takes the top spot for online booksellers, while social ecommerce channels saw The Art of Replying: High EQ response skills to make people like you from the first word occupy the number one.
How this continues to play out on publishers’ acquisitions, pricing, and sales methods is going to drive the trade book market. Clippable, meme-able non-fiction with a clear call to action are without question best suited to the frenetic world of online sharing and buying. Yet the margin pressure from these ecommerce channels mean that smaller, slower volume sales for higher margins through physical and online booksellers will still have value to publishers willing to commit to a long tail sales cycle.
The government, meanwhile, similar to the UK, has focused its not insubstantial resources and designated 2026 as a National Year of Reading, included in a raft of new regulations signed by Premier Li Qiang and intended to shore up the position of books as central to Chinese culture and development.
Prior to this year, there has been little or no meaningful effort since the start of the pandemic to reduce the impacts of heavy social media use on reading habits, attention spans, mental health, or indeed non-technology business. What this Reading Year will entail is as yet unclear, although an annual reading week has been mandated for the entire country in the last week of April every year.
It is tempting to say that in the face of China’s titanic tech sector any effort is too little too late. But the publishing industry has always occupied a special place in the Chinese official hierarchy, reporting not as a mere government ministry but into the elevated Propaganda Bureau. The government has shown no sign that they do not continue to value the publishing sector as a key tool of education and cohesion for the country. And when China’s government really sets its mind to something, there are numerous, powerful levers that can be pulled. In short: Watch this space.
Contact me on jo[at]pixieb.com
I'm glad you're doing this, Jo. I have certainly seen a change over the years, which makes the fact that our huge history project was, after 10 years, finally published in Chinese last year. I wish I knew the politics behind that. No idea about sales figures, and not certain I'll ever see them but I will try. https://karenchristensen.substack.com/p/our-longest-march-with-photos-from-c6a