Who can provide me with an article in the 12th issue of Germination Magazine in 2007, called "The Golden Age", thank you.

Golden Age

1998～2001

Domestic online bookstores generally appeared after 1997, provided by NetEase and others, which provided information for the development of early book sites. material basis. In that era when everyone was running the Internet, many netizens who liked reading opened their own personal websites.

In March 1998, "Literature City" was launched. The site currently has more than 1 million page views per month and 10,000 email subscribers.

In May 1998, "Golden Bookstore" was launched online. With detailed classification and multi-faceted information, the site now has about 30,000 visitors every day, and the number of email subscriptions is close to 1. Thousands of people.

On July 10, 1998, "Book Road" was officially founded and has now developed into a large-scale literary website with more than 10,000 daily visits to the home page. After the mailing list was opened in January 1999, in just three months, the number of subscribers reached 5,000.

In the early days, online book sites mainly focused on reprinting, and the copyright awareness was weak. Some websites enrich their website content by scanning physical books such as martial arts and romance books onto the Internet, while more websites directly reprint them from other websites. In this case, the content of each site is similar.

During this period, serialized works such as "Double Dragon of the Tang Dynasty" and "Star Wars Heroes" became the trump cards for various book sites to attract readers. Many new readers came into contact with the Internet to catch up on Huang Yi's "The Legend of Two Dragons of the Tang Dynasty". "Because it is a serial and only one volume is published in Hong Kong a month, the Internet is naturally the best way to get a sneak peek." Which website uploads quickly, which website scans with high quality, and which book website can attract more readers.

Among the early book sites, Crouching Tiger Jude had the best reputation for proofreading. The proofreading of its collected works was exquisite, and it became the first choice among netizens for a while. While reading physical books in the school, Crouching Tiger House also serialized original works such as Fengzi and Water Dragon Yin on the website. It can be said that in terms of the quality of the works alone, Crouching Tiger Residence should be the best online book site of that era. However, due to the small overall number of collected works, the traffic of the website has never been comparable to those of comprehensive bookstores. Instead, Golden Bookstore, which uses the scanned version of Crouching Tiger Jude, relied on its massive works and detailed classification to become one of the top ten most influential personal sites in mainland China, and won the runner-up in the 98 Personal Homepage Competition.

At that time, the Internet was still dominated by portals. Readers discovered that new literary websites were mostly accessed through portals such as Yahoo, or through friendly links between sites. Friendly links are almost the only way for many websites to develop new members, and it is difficult for new websites to enter.

In this general environment, Golden Bookstore has taken advantage of its first-mover advantage to firmly occupy the position of the leader of online book sites. It is known as "If you don't know the golden bookstore when reading online, it is useless to call it a netizen".

With the development of the website, Golden Bookstore noticed the problem that "the proportion of original works on the Internet is not enough, and the emphasis on book reviews is not enough", so it launched the "Netizen Original" column and began Cultivation of online originality.

It can be said that judging from the monopoly position of Golden Bookstore at that time, as long as it did not make too many mistakes in its development, it would be difficult for other online book sites to threaten it.

However, the intervention of capital changed the trajectory of fate.

In December 1999, Duolaimi Chinese website purchased 16 of the top 20 personal websites in NetEase’s personal website rankings for 4 million yuan. Including famous domestic websites such as Golden Bookstore, China Football Network, Hai Kuo Tian Tian Download, Xiaolin Guangji, etc.

After Golden Bookstore was acquired, due to copyright considerations, it did not dare to be too liberal in plagiarism and copying. Many readable works could not be included in it, but there were not many original works, causing readers The group gradually lost, and it took the initiative to give up its dominant position as an online book site.

Almost at the same time that Golden Bookstore was acquired, Boku was established in Silicon Valley, USA, and conducted large-scale recruitment in Beijing. From a well-known domestic book and newspaper alone, the newly born Boku poached more than a dozen editors and reporters, many of whom were key staff of the newspaper. This incident caused quite a shock to the entire publishing industry at the time.

Because of the support of American industrial capital rather than venture capital, and the presence of senior book industry professionals, Boku’s future was once optimistic about the industry.

At the beginning of its business, Boku carried out a series of promotional activities that were dazzling: first, it carried out overwhelming advertising in major media, and then joined forces with China Youth Publishing House, Peking University and other units to launch "Walking Horses on the Yellow River" and "Dunhuang Tour" and other activities to build momentum. Later, in addition to acquiring a large number of electronic copyrights of works, in the name of cultivating China's "Stephen King", he signed contracts with a large number of writers such as Wang Shuo and Chen Cun. It can be said that Boku has really put a lot of thought into expanding its popularity and website views.

However, the spirit of paid downloading and paid reading advocated by Boku seems out of place in this era of Internet hegemony where free has become the general rule. Piracy is rampant, and the advantage of its most important upstream resource—thousands of e-books signed with almost all well-known Chinese writers, authors, and scholars—has not been fully utilized. In addition, the network conditions at that time were not adequate. There were few people online, the network speed was slow and expensive, and there were no convenient payment conditions.

After the first investment, investors refused to make additional investments on the grounds that the profit model was unrealistic. By the end of 2001, the collapse of Boku announced the failure of China's first ebook charging attempt.

With the burst of the Internet bubble, the golden age of online book sites also came to an end. A large number of early online book sites collapsed, and the surviving sites had to start thinking of ways to make money.