Two more “Book cities” to be open in Ho Chi Minh City.
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Another one will be set up at Van Hanh Mall in district 10 with a luxurious design and beautiful atmosphere for readers in January. Each book city will cover an area of more than 3,000sq.m with capacity for 50,000 book titles and tens of thousands of stationery items.
The area will include a bookstore, stationery shop, coffee shop, entertainment area, multimedia recreation area, creativity rest area and reading areas. The two book cities will provide many conveniences to visitors, including a panel for searching book titles, online shopping and e-reading tools.
In June, PNC launched the first “book city” with a cost of 50 billion VND (2.2 million USD) at the Aeon Mall Binh Duong Canary in Thuan An town in the southern province of Binh Duong. It provides 50,000 book titles, 1,500 music discs and products from 150 stationery brands.
Last year, PNC opened 13 new bookstores across Vietnam, raising its number of locations to 52 and bringing it closer to main rival Fahasa, the dominant bookstore chain in Vietnam, which has 94 locations nationwide.
That said, Vietnam’s book industry, in general, has been on the decline, with the number of copies-per-person dropping in 2016 to 3.6 from 2015’s 4.1, according to statistics from the Vietnam Publishers Association (VPA). The digital market also saw little improvement last year, VPA pointed out, as out of 64,588 publication registrations in 2016, only 1,893 were published in digital format.
