From physic books, e-books, now to mobile applications, how does a publishing institution with a century-long renown history pass on in its academic field and reposition and innovate in the ever-changing mobile internet environment? With these questions, Bookdao interviewed Gu Qing, executive director of The Commercial Press. 

At the beginning of November, The Commercial Press Annual Top 10 Books was selected. This is an activity that has been running continuously for ten years. For each year, The Commercial Press invites scholars, publishers, and media to review and select the best books from the ones they publish that year. 

Ten years ago, there were quite a few book lists in the market by various media but The Commercial Press still decided to launch one of their own. "We considered launching for two reasons: one is for marketing purposes, that we can make a large number of new books we published every year known to a wider audience. The other is for employee development and evaluation, that we can create a healthy competition among editors through the annual event, which is also a kind of recognition and evaluation for the work of editors." Gu Qing said. 

In 2022, The Commercial Press published more than 1,400 new titles and reprinted over 3,000 titles. It builds up a long tail of book lists in ten years, which is sufficient to make an effective analysis and sort out the readers' reading trends, preferences, and other changes. "Readers' demands and understanding of books have changed profoundly in these ten years." Gu Qing affirmed, "The Annual Top 10 Books very clearly reflects the changes in China's reading pattern and the increasing demands for knowledge." 

As a publishing institution with a century-long history, The Commercial Press also plays a pivotal role in academic publishing. The Commercial Press has published many prestigious works that are acclaimed in the past. However, capturing the needs of a new generation of readers becomes more essential. 

"User-oriented mindset is a commonly known term used in the Internet industry. It is precisely what The Commercial Press adheres to and how we always closely link to the needs of readers, constantly push the new, and lead the market. " 

The product structure of The Commercial Press is held up in two segments: one is the kingdom of tool books, and the other is the leader in academic publishing.

"From the aspect of academic publishing, our editors themselves are specialists, they all have a good academic foundation and their own research fields, so they know very well what kind of books scholars need because they are scholars themselves. Their editing and publishing process is actually a user-oriented process. People who write books, publish books, and read books form a professional closed loop here." Gu Qing explained very graphically, "Why do we emphasize this professional closed loop of academic publishing? I am especially worried that real academic publishing would enter the commercial mass market, it would be harmful to academic works." 

Another business of The Commercial Press is tool books, including the Xinhua Dictionary, the Modern Chinese Dictionary, etc. Such works are different from academic ones because they are aimed at the most basic readership. The Commercial Press has a very clear understanding of the needs of this readership, "Most of the users of these books are students, and we have continuous attention to their usage scenarios, functional needs, and constantly upgrade these works according to the changes in social life."

Whether it is the publication of academic or tool books, the requirements for editors are very high, and Gu Qing repeatedly said one phrase - sink your teeth into it. "The Commercial Press is like a melting pot. Excellent talents from various professions enter here, and through a period of practice, they form a set of proven working methodologies and finally become experts and scholars in their fields. No matter how good your previous grades and how famous your university is, everyone must build their career path with the right amount of practice on the post over time." 

The requirements of The Commercial Press for talents are relatively high, in addition to the most basic academic requirements, there are also professional requirements. For example, the ability to conduct dialogs with professionals or even first-class scholars, or proficiency in German if you are editors in the western philosophy field. Gu Qing said: "As a mature and traditional publishing institution, publishing however many good books or owning however excellent editors are not the core competitiveness. It's the ability to pass on the legacy that is the core. Publishing at The Commercial Press is a business of one generation after another. A young editor needs to be able to settle down in the heritage system of The Commercial Press, master The Commercial Press methodology, and finally, be recognized by the older generation editors." 

In a modern enterprise system, the turnover of talents is a normal phenomenon. Even for The Commercial Press, people come and go. Gu Qing sees this very calmly, "The Commercial Press has a large number of people, they all have a certain quality, can sink their teeth into doing something solid, and finally grow into the 'characters' in their fields, and mastered we called 'core competitiveness', which is passed down in our training system. In this process, some people can not meet the criteria or can not persevere until the end." 

In the age of mobile Internet, readers have become accustomed to getting all kinds of information at their fingertips through online searches and various encyclopedic tools, and the time for reading has been significantly compressed. But Gu Qing sees the Internet differently, "Internet search, for example, has actually played a major role in popularizing basic knowledge to readers. Although the content it presents is still far from accurate knowledge, its commerciality of it has been criticized. But isn't this an opportunity for us publishers? The really advanced, precise, and academic knowledge is what we publishers are good at. The two do not conflict, and can even be considered to complement each other." 

To catch the express train of the Internet and seize the new generation of readers, The Commercial Press has also made a lot of efforts in the way of convergent development. 

The Commercial Press has established its own wholly-owned subsidiary, Wanyou Zhidian (万有知典) Digital Media Technology Co., Ltd, with tool books and related digital publishing as its core business, dedicated to building unique advantages in content and technology in the field of digital publishing of dictionaries, and providing authoritative knowledge services for users. 

The digitization of tool books is a major project of The Commercial Press. Up to now, there are a variety of media convergence products, i.e., the Xinhua Dictionary App, the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary App, etc. Hanfen (涵芬) App, the knowledge service platform of language resources, not only aggregates several high-quality Chinese dictionaries under The Commercial Press but also develops an intelligent one-stop word search and self-learning function specifically for primary and secondary school students. It is also the first language learning service platform based on authoritative tool books in China. 

In October 2021, The Commercial Press and Youdao (有道) entered into a strategic cooperation. Many authoritative dictionary contents published by The Commercial Press are stationed in Youdao intelligent hardware. 

"It is difficult for a traditional publishing institution to transform into digital publishing and convergent development publishing, especially difficult to transform mindsets of people in time." 

Gu Qing put forward his own criteria for the success of convergent development publishing: first, the income of digital business should become the pillar of the publishing house; second, it should make its own brand in the digital industry beyond publishing, and turn from a business into an industry. "In a convergent development publishing house from my perspective, the overall work should be carried out in the digital environment, including the environment of content creation, the environment of operation, and the environment of technology. It should have a strong ability in obtaining content from multiple terminals and also be proficient in innovation and production. It should be a content-oriented output chain of multiple terminals." 

In Gu Qing's opinion, traditional publishers and publishing institutions need to break their thinking inertia, "In the Internet era, there is a different user demographic for each product, due to different ways users acquire knowledge, and different functions each product provides. This is actually what we call a user-oriented mindset. From e-books to databases to the now popular smart wearables, our readers are exposed to more and more new products, and what we want to do is to embrace our users and present better products to them, instead of pulling them back into the old model." 

The cooperation with Youdao last year was considered a kind of alliance, in Gu Qing’s view, there must be an intersection between different products, whether in content or functionality. They are a two-way selection process, whether it is "out of the circle cooperation" with companies like Youdao, or other forms of innovation. "Alliance is the road to convergent development publishing".