"Shut Down In 30 Days" Bookstore

Online bookstore price war smoke everywhere, the survival of the entity bookstore becomes the focus again. At this time, a bookstore of 30 square meters came into the world, opened less than half a month, the average daily sales of more than 100 books, the daily turnover in two or three thousand yuan, the highest day ever broke through five thousand yuan.

With such a short opening time and such a small scale, why can the performance of this bookstore defy the market?

The book store is called "30 Days to Go Out of Business" and, true to its name, its slogan is: Welcome, promote closure! This is indeed a bookstore that closes after 30 days, a performance art exhibition. Nut is the curator of the exhibition, and Yaku Art Space offers 30 days of free rent for him. The store mainly sells humanities and social science books.

The birth of the "closed in 30 days" bookstore was originally related to a closed bookstore and a disappeared owner.

The owner of the bookstore, Ren Heda, called "OCT Old Book Center," filled his 28-square-meter room with books. The books he couldn't put down were placed under two large banyan trees outside. Ren and Da, who dreamed of running the largest used book market in Shenzhen, kept the store for ten years. Say sell a book, actually is half sell half give away. While selling books while reading, he made several large books of reading notes. If customers want to buy books, if he is reading, he will not sell.

In August 2010, Ren and Da were forced to live in the open air, sleeping on a broken sofa, after the bookstore failed to pay the rent. But he still wanted to keep it open. He wrote letters about the idea of opening a used bookstore, but couldn't find a place where he could afford the rent. By the end of October, Renhoda had disappeared.

Ren and Da's brother Ren Peijun rushed to Shenzhen from Henan, did not find his brother, only to see tens of thousands of books under the banyan tree had been regarded as a treasure by his brother. These books, if not dealt with in time, will soon become waste paper.

When Nut learned about this, he immediately posted a post on Douban.com asking for volunteers to classify the books for sale. In the process of selling books, Nuts became good friends with volunteers such as Chen Shige and Tan Zhaoguo, and the books left by Ren and da were sold out under everyone's efforts.

Witnessed the disappearance of a bookstore, the disappearance of a shopkeeper, nuts and friends began to really pay attention to the survival of private entity bookstores.

Have data to show, since 2007, the our country closes the closed private bookstore amounts to more than 10,000. In the past decade, more than 50 percent of private bookstores have closed: in January 2010, Beijing's Third Pole Bookstore closed; In June 2011, Beijing "Wind Ease" was closed; In September 2011, Hong Kong Sanlian Bookstore withdrew from Guangzhou, and at the end of October 2011, Photosynthesis closed its doors...

In a trance, Nut felt that there were only two bookstores left in the whole of China: one called Xinhua Bookstore, and the other called the bookstore that was going out of business. He thought, since the best bookstore can not avoid the closure, it is better to set up a perfect and beautiful bookstore, so the "30 days to close" bookstore was born.

In order to get more people involved, Nutou recruited 30 book lovers to serve as store managers through Douban and Weibo for the "Shut down in 30 Days" bookstore campaign, and each store manager was responsible for daily operation of the bookstore for one day. The final 30 store managers include poets, accountants, school social workers, people's teachers, product designers, cafe owners, animation screenwriters, pizza lovers... There's even a cat.

Yes, the fourth day of the bookstore owner, is a cat named "Boss", all day long with the book company, it when the day of the store manager, he contributed his beautiful cat PAWS to buy the book to cover the "plum blossom" souvenir.

In order to deeply implement the "thirty store manager, thirty kinds of bookstore fun", nuts to the store manager assigned a task, everyone should put forward a problem, in their own manager that day, the problem will be written on the small blackboard at the door of the bookstore, and the bookstore people exchange.

On the third day, the store manager "Black Chicken", she wanted to communicate with everyone about the question: 24 hours in a day, how much time do you leave for dreams? She thinks that the young people in Shenzhen work too hard, work overtime every day, even give up life. She wants us to think about the way we live now and not to treat ourselves carelessly.

Some store managers choose fun topics. For example, on the 14th day, store manager Rui Zhen discussed with everyone in the bookstore "how to 'hook up' with strangers". The 19th day of the shutdown coincided with Singles' Day, which falls on November 11. With the slogan "This is the day we believe in love again," the store's manager held a bachelor party at the store, featuring guitar singing and book borrowing.

The bookstore does not forget to cultivate an academic atmosphere. Scholars give lectures one after another. Some talk about reading and writing, the development of the bookstore, and also about new media and modernist painting schools.

The "30 Days or Go Out of Business" bookstore campaign is moving closer and closer to Nut's original vision of a spontaneous 30-day cultural festival.

In this bookstore, you can often see people holding video cameras, they are the "30 days to close down" bookstore DV volunteers posted on Douban.com. Jerry is one of them, at first he wanted to convey by filming a documentary bookstore survival difficult, but after the shooting, he found himself would like to tell you, what can bring us the entity bookstore, not only is there a book in the bookstore, more important is to have a dream of breath, the humanistic spirit and gentle belief, and that is a lot of people to the complex of entity bookstore.