In Beijing, you will soon be able to order books with your lunch on Chinese food delivery app Meituan
- A first batch of 72 bookstores are launching on food delivery platform Meituan “as soon as next week”
- Booksellers in China’s capital city have been struggling to stay afloat due to reduced footfall during the epidemic
Bookstores in Beijing, struggling to survive amid the coronavirus epidemic, are teaming up with a popular food delivery app to help get books into the hands of readers.
“Due to the epidemic, 80 per cent of physical bookstores are closed,” the publicity department of the Communist Party of China’s Beijing Municipal Committee told local media. “Although many of them try to launch online programmes to keep customers, it doesn’t make a substantial income for stores … companies want the government to coordinate more resources and platforms to help them.”
The bookstores will not have to pay a fee to join the programme, according to the Beijing publicity department.
Users will be able to purchase books on Meituan “as soon as next week”, the food delivery company said in a statement. “After the launch, we will support bookstores by charging them lower service fees, providing subsidies and launching reward plans to help them get on board quickly,” the company added.
Bookstores in China’s capital city have been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak. About 60 per cent of 248 stores in Beijing said they expected their revenues to drop more than 50 per cent year-on-year, while only 48 per cent said their cash flows were sufficient to support operations for another one to three months, according to a report by the Beijing Institute of Culture Innovation and Communication.