ALL-NIGHT KNOWLEDGE: Customers browse and read books at the SanlianTaofen Bookstore, the first 24-hour bookshop in Beijing, on the evening of April 21 (CFP)

Bookworms and literarily inclined night owls in Beijing now have a new place in the city to enjoy their reading downtime. SanlianTaofen Bookstore (STB) in Dongcheng District of Beijing expanded its opening hours to 24 hours from April 8, making it the city's first 24-hour book store.

STB displays 80,000 titles within a space of 1,500 square meters, and is currently regarded as one of Beijing's cultural landmarks.

Fan Xi'an, General Manager of the store, borrowed the 24-hour concept from Taiwanese retail chain Eslite Bookstore. "I was thrilled by the large number of readers in Eslite Bookstore at night when I visited Taiwan in 2010," he said to Xinhua News Agency.

Despite being China's cultural epicenter, Beijing had lacked somewhere readers could indulge their passion for the printed word around the clock until now. Moreover, the process of having a casual browse in bookstores can often, ironically, be an exhausting one for Beijingers. Most bookstores in the capital do not offer readers chairs to sit down, relax and read a book. Readers therefore have to stand while holding a book and are forced to skim the text quickly.

Many traditional bookstores have faced difficulties owing to their rivals online. Online bookstores have the competitive advantage as they can order books in bulk and are free from the overheads of running a traditional brick-and-mortar store. However, the extra costs faced by some local bookstores can now be covered by sponsorship from the government—part of authorities' broader scheme to subsidize a total of 56 bookstores around China, Xinhua recently reported.

As of the start of this year, traditional bookstores are no longer required to pay value-added tax, and the government has announced 90 million yuan ($14.6 million) to support 55 operations just like STB, said Fan.

As evening falls, the STB is now crowded with readers and customers. In front of almost every bookshelf, people are sitting or standing, their noses buried in books. The nightlife of Beijingers has been enriched with yet another meaningful cultural practice: that of reading.

Reading matters

Today, China's press and book market is undergoing an unprecedented boom. In 2012, China published a total of 7.9 billion copies of books in 414,005 categories, ranking it the No. 1 in the world. But a recent survey on the reading situation doesn't paint as optimistic a picture.

The Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Press and Publication (CAPP) released an annual report on Chinese people's reading habits on April 21. The report shows that only 57.8 percent of all people read books every day in 2013. CAPP said in the report that last year, the average Chinese adult read 4.77 books. Despite a small rise compared with 4.39 in 2012, the number still falls far below many other countries around the globe. According to statistics from UNESCO, people from Scandinavian countries on average read 24 books a year per person while in the United States seven books a year. In Asia, South Korea comes in first place with 11 books being read per person a year.

In China, people like to read books concerning topics such as cookery, health, and baby rearing as well as novels and exam guides. Chinese people on average spend 100 minutes watching television and 45 minutes surfing the Internet every day. The average daily time spent reading books, however, is only 15 minutes.