Last time I mentioned that the mentality between literary magazine editors and book lovers isn’t purely “addition”—it involves many rational analysing and calculation. This time let’s talk about the most interesting variant: readers.

The interesting part about readers is that they can always stun you with all sorts of surprising questions or suggestions. For instance, they will leave a comment to request us to invite a certain writer to interview, ask about a certain book’s sale point, or even follow up on a certain restaurant’s address mentioned by the interviewee in the article. These “strange questions” certainly reflect that the readers attach much importance and thinking to the content, but at the same time it also reflects some collective mentality of Hong Kong and Macao readers.

“The information is detailed and the page design is rich. You can tell that the editors are really hardworking!”

A loyal reader of mine told me this. Maybe she doesn’t know that such casual remark had me pondering for a long time. I especially took the word “hardworking” to heart. My conclusion is that what she was trying to say was “there’re too many texts!”

I didn’t intend to rebut by mentioning such remark again. It’s only that I believe that she was not the only one thinking this. I would say this because nowadays the posts come extremely quick and most people’s reading habit are thus influenced: short articles, infographic which simplifies complicated information and the visual impact brought by beautiful illustrations have long reduced our acceptance of long articles. The strong interactivity of the cyber world enables readers to give feedback while reading, and become part of the people that changes or leads the direction of discussion. Comparatively, reading on paper is no doubt a more lonely and slower process. In addition, books magazines are confined by topics and the effect by illustrations or artwork are limited. It is easy to make readers feel an imbalance of pictures and texts, and fall into the predicament of being “wordly”.

“I don’t have time to go to the book store to get the magazine every month—can you mail them to me? I will pay for the postage.”

Similar messages appear via phone calls or Facebook almost every month—pretty in line with Hong Kong people’s mass ideology that “time > money”. But according to the current situation, including the magazine that I work for, there are three magazines with the topic of reading. Coincidentally, all three are sponsored by a certain listed property company, and all three are distributed in the malls under that company, retail bookstores, upstairs bookstores and different schools from university, secondary schools to primary schools. It is easy to get a book on hand, but the current atmosphere is that people complain it’s inconvenient to pick up a book from the convenient store down the road—they prefer to have it delivered directly to their home. The impact of being “free” may be far lower than being “convenient”. To make the people in this city to actually pay for a literary magazine, the path is even more winding and long. In face of this, having good content is the basic requirement; how to attract eyeballs by “sharp” designs that tell stories, and to keep the topics more relevant to public lives are what we have to dig deep for.

However, exactly because our patience to long articles are getting lower, and we attach more and more importance to time, I am more convinced that a healthy city should have one (or more) reading magazines to allow people to balance between fragmented texts and long articles on paper books, and to squeeze out some time in such a rushed live. Only by doing so can we slowly build up the tempo and feeling of grabbing a book on hand to read it and popularise reading.

So, in addition to promoting reading, are there other roles that a reading magazine can play in a city? Let’s talk about it next time.