Chinese e-commerce company DangDang, Inc. has launched a campaign aimed at promoting parent-child reading and ultimately strengthening the literary culture in the country.
The campaign titled "Parents and Children Read for 21 Days," was launched on Tuesday, April 21, in Beijing. Throughout the duration of the campaign, DangDang will engage in up to 1,000 reading activities to promote literacy across the country.
Although the World Bank lists China as having a literacy rate of up to 95 percent, the literary culture in the country could be waning. According to a report by Women of China, a survey conducted by DangDang and specialist marketing consultancy firm Answer-child.com shows both Chinese children and adults fail to dedicate a lot of time to reading.
Out of the 27,000 people sampled for the survey, the report showed that although 90 percent of the parents who were questioned agreed that reading was important to their children, only 60 percent of them actually read with their children and 55 percent were clueless about how to improve their children's interest in reading.
"It takes a person at least 21 days to develop a good habit, with children's reading habits included, which takes longer than one day to develop," explains Wang Yue, the vice president of DangDang.
"We hope this public welfare activity can help encourage parents to build a second environment at home so as to get their children to love reading more," Wang added.
According to the survey, while the average Chinese child read much more books (20) than the average Chinese adult in 2014, this was actually half the amount of books that a U.S. primary student read in the same year.
DangDang continues to dominate the Chinese book industry. In the fourth quarter of 2014, the company announced a profit of about 32.8 million yuan ($5.6 million), according to PR Newswire. This represents a 51.4-percent growth from 21.7 million yuan (3.5 million) in the same quarter in 2013.
DangDang may have successfully expanded from an online bookstore to a full e-commerce outlet, but experts say the company is intent on consolidating its share in the local book industry and winning new customers.