Interesting things are happening on well-known Chungching South Road in Taipei City: Eastern Publishing Co. plans to wind up its retail business, and the space on the first floor of Cheng Chung Book Company has already been converted into a snack shop, and Cheng Chung itself is going to be bought by Shih Hsin University. Unlike these old bookshops, which are closing down one by one as a result of poor sales, 69-dollar bookshops are thriving.

At the entrance to the Feng Yun Book Shop, which is just a few steps away from Eastern Publishing Co., there is a large, eye-catching banner with the characters "69 Dollars for All Books" written on it, creating a "cheap and cheerful" flavor--be it the exterior of the shop or the style of display of the books in it.

Plummeting rentals

In an office cramped with books located on the second floor of the bookshop and connected by narrow spiral iron staircases, Shen Jung-yu sits juggling the sales figures of seven retail shops. Shen, a library studies graduate of the World College of Journalism and Communications had run a typesetting company, and been given a pile of books in place of payment due to him by a bookshop operator forced to wind up his business because of flagging sales. For four years at a stretch, Shen operated a roadside bookstall at the Shihlin Night Market, and subsequently set up the Tien Long and Feng Yun bookshops.

Tien Long and Feng Yun, which were located on Chungching South Road, were inundated with muddy water during Typhoon Nari in 2001. His losses ran into several million NT dollars, with one or maybe even two thousand copies of the novels of Louis Cha submerged under water. Shen Jung-yu originally planned to return the books to the publisher, but the company was prepared to pay only NT$50 per copy for returned books. Shen then decided to follow in the footsteps of the Japanese 100-yen bookshops by selling the "soaked books" and "old stock" for NT$69 each.

In October 2001, Shen's first 69-dollar bookshop opened for business on Sungchiang Road, offering the martial arts novels of Louis Cha--originally priced at NT$200 odd--at NT$69. Word spread over the Internet, and the branch in Sungchiang Road was humming with business in no time. However, the success of the Sungchiang Road branch was not repeated in the second bookshop, located at the Sungshan Railway Station. The second branch closed three months later.

After paying for his "lessons," Shen became more cautious in the selection of location because, as he has said, "Location is the key factor for success." His third branch is located opposite National Taiwan Normal University on Hoping East Road. Well-placed in a cultural and educational area, it draws book readers and buyers, and the business has gradually stabilized. The Chunghsiao branch and National Taiwan University branch opened in succession, and at the peak of his business, Shen had seven branches in total.

In fact, the recession was ironically the reason for the swift expansion of the 69-dollar bookshops. As businesses have suffered losses in recent years, rentals for a great many shop spaces in prime locations have plummeted. In the past, monthly rentals for shops in the vicinity of National Taiwan Normal University would have cost at least NT$600,000 a month, but now they can be rented for half the amount; whereas the rental for the Taiwan University branch near Hsinhai Road has dropped from NT$350,000 to NT$150,000 per month.

Searching for pearls in mud

"In business, you must let go when you have to," says Shen Jung-yu. He says he will not hesitate to wind up the retail operation if he cannot make a profit from it. Nevertheless he is adventurous enough to be on the constant lookout for suitable locations. A case in point is the fact that ten out of ten persons surveyed will tell you that bookshops located on the third floor will never make it. Yet, he is willing to go against the grain, and in March he opened one on a high floor of the NOVA computer mart on Kuanchien Road near Taipei Railway Station. "The owner of NOVA estimates the human traffic on Kuanchien Road to be as high as 150,000 on weekdays and up to about 250,000 on weekends," he says. "I feel like giving it a try."

Besides the decline in bookstore rentals, many publishers have gone belly-up in the past two years and there has been a big jump in the number of unsold books returned by bookstores to publishers. This enables Shen Jung-yu to buy new books in bulk. Some of the returned titles, which would normally cost NT$20 a copy, can now be had for less than NT$10, giving him a handsome profit margin.

Despite the fact that prices of most of the titles at 69-dollar bookshops--mainly books returned from stores to publishers--have been standardized, the demands of the branches vary from one to another.

Types of titles for display at the bookshops are selected to match the characteristics of the neighborhoods. In addition to the common cookbooks, romantic novels, language books and dictionaries available at all the shops, Shen displays more titles on literature, history and philosophy at the branches in the neighborhood of the two universities, where the majority of the crowds are university students, while the branch in Chungching South Road features mainly popular books and books about family life. And if you care to spend some time searching, you may even hit on complete sets of martial arts novels, classic movies on DVD, and autobiographies of world-renowned personalities.

Shen Jung-yu observes that cookery and gardening books are the most popular among his 10,000-odd titles. "Book buyers are smart," he says, and a cheap bookstore too must have fine stuff with which to attract the consumers. He thinks nothing of purchasing highly priced titles. A case in point is a cookbook originally priced at about NT$200, but which he paid NT$60 for, only to have it sold for NT$69 at his shops.

Price war

"We are no threat to the business of chain bookshops," says Shen Jung-yu. "We are cultivating people who were not exactly book buyers to start with." He cites the example of a man from a building company who recently dropped in to buy a set of hardcover books for NT$30,000, as part of the decorations for the company's show flats, and that of a Hong Kong travel guide book, originally priced at NT$368, immensely thick and containing pretty outdated information, which nevertheless still finds buyers.

"Undercutting your rivals' prices is the golden rule of business competition. But we all should try to think of other business strategies during the publishing recession." Shen Jung-yu is of the opinion that although the big publishers regard him as "a salesman who cheapens culture," yet what he is doing is merely "selling the right books to the right people." Moreover, he did not set the precedent for selling a book at NT$69--the first title in the military history series published by Yuan-Liou Publishing Company more than ten years ago was priced at NT$69. Subsequently, to promote Agatha Christie's series of detective books, the publishing company again fixed the price of the first title in the series at NT$69. To date, there are still 20-odd titles published by Yuan-Liou that are priced at NT$69 each.

Shen Jung-yu works 18 hours a day and describes himself as a workaholic. But he has always regarded work as entertainment. On some days, you may catch him standing behind the counter working out the bills for customers, wrapping up their books and chatting with them to get an idea of their interests. Such times are his "break times."

Shen admits frankly that "you can't find the top ten titles by large publishers here. Writers are conscious of their reputations; they would rather leave their books in the store than have them sold at cheap prices. But these days publishers are under tremendous pressure to clear back stocks, and even the Eslite bookstore chain slapped an 80% discount price tag on some 80,000 titles, describing the act as "placing books under the sun to rid them of the damp."

"The boss of Shui Chun Book Shop near National Taiwan Normal University is my guru," says Shen. "His bookshop beats a hundred bookshops in business single-handedly; he can afford to place an order worth NT$15 million with big publishers." As to his own dream, he says if he should do so well one day as to open ten or even 20 branches of the 69-dollar bookshop, he would be better able to bargain with big publishers--all to the benefit of book lovers.

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Cookbooks, photo collections, comic books, martial arts novels, even VCDs and DVDs, all at NT$69 each, regardless of category, size, or print quality. Come search for buried treasure!