Shanghai Book Mall, one of the largest book stores in the city, located on Fuzhou Road, is turning into a library, and a library that provides much newer books.
Every day you can expect to see more people than usual sitting on the floor, in the corner, on the edge of the escalators, or in the crevices between bookshelves, doing one thing: copying the book being read. Usually this group of people will spend the whole day in nearly the same place in the book mall. They will curl their legs a little when they get in the way of passers-by. They take their pens, paper and lunches to the book mall but never takes a single book out of it. And they do it frequently.
And now even the pens in their hands are becoming outdated. Here come the high-tech helpers: digital cameras and mobile phones with the capability to take photos. A portion of book copiers are replacing their slow pens with these high-speed cutting-edge tools. Although it is doubtful at first glance whether it is economical to employ such highly expensive instruments, equalling stacks of books in monetary value, to photograph the book pages, it is to be noted that doing so is actually only a supplementary "free-rider" function of these high-tech instruments.
Rich people care little about book prices. Poor people have little time and leisure for reading. Real intellectuals do not like the idea of book copying, which damages their pride and self-image. But the mass public, who are less than rich, not poor and other than intellectual, are actually the biggest market for books. And their biggest concern is - the price.
The high price of books in Shanghai has always been a concern to locals. Book prices in many Western countries are also very high but much lower than their Chinese counterparts if calculated against the disposable income of their average citizens. Despite consistent social appeal for a reduction in book prices, the prices keep soaring. Books are on the way to becoming luxuries.
Soon a vicious cycle becomes inevitable: on the one hand, readers are reluctant to buy books because of the price and on the other hand the publisher and the seller continue to set high prices for books to make up the losses resulting from decreased books sales.
Another embarrassing explanation for the growth of book copiers seems to be that today, books worthy of collection and repeated appreciation are becoming ever less easy to find. Fewer and fewer books are "organic", but rather are reduced to products of copy and paste. If in a whole book, only a few paragraphs are of value, then why not just write them down on your notebook instead of paying for the whole book?
And finally the lack of a developed second hand book market may also have contributed to the problem. Unlike in many Western countries where there are developed second-hand book markets, Chinese people do not like the idea of "second-hand", whatever the nature of the "second-hand" object. Accordingly, the second-hand book trade is less developed.
Although book sellers are quite unhappy at book copying, book copiers are generally not interfered with when they copy the books (but things are different in small private book stores). Such freedom has caused and is causing damage to books. Many books with beautiful pictures, which are usually highly priced and frequently photographed, suffer more than their share of wear and tear. The reason is simple: people need to have high morals, if they do not have incentives, to take good care of things that are not theirs.
It is hard to tell when it became common for Shanghai people to copy books in book stores, but it is now really posing some problems. And it is not just the readers who should take the blame.
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