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60 lines
4.7 KiB
HTML
60 lines
4.7 KiB
HTML
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<title>bertelsmann</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Biyi Wen">
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<li class="crumb"><a href="index.html">Index</a></li>
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<li class="crumb"><a href="borges_bookstore.html">Borges Bookstore</a></li>
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<li class="crumb">Bertelsmann</li>
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<h1>Bertelsmann</h1>
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<p style="margin-top:60px;">June 2008, <a class="external" href="http://finance.sina.com.cn/blank/qygc209bertelsmann.shtml">Sina News</a> remarked on Bertelsmann's closure in Chinese market in the following words - "Bertelsmann terminates its business in both online and offline distribution of books, along with Der Club Bertelsmann, which has over 1,500,000 subscribing memberships over the country."</p>
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<p>The catalogs that I saw, subscribed by the students in my parents' school, are from Bertelsmann. For 20 RMB, a customer can subscribe for a year-long membership. As a requirement, members should purchase at least one book per season, under designated categories. </p>
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<p>This tradition is descended from Bertelsmann's business model from its early days. During the WWII, Bertelsmann became a major publisher for the Nazi party; generating revenues by printing contents populated with Nazi propoganda. After the war, Bertelsmann faced nationwide economic recession. As a strategy to stimulate sales, Bertelsmann founded a book club "Lesering". It re-prints materials after 4-6 months after the initial launch, therefore circumvents national policy of fixed pricing, making book price much lower. This strategy attracted large population of memberships.</p>
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<p>In the following decades, Bertelsmann grew into a global player in media industry. In 1997, Bertelsmann entered the Chinese market after initial market research. Its business model is catalog based membership subscription. Before e-commerce became popular, shopping by catalog was a prominent business model. Do you remember television shopping as well?</p>
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<p>In 1999, Bertelsmann launched <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040612052801/http://bolchina.com/cgi-bin/bol/bol/hmp_welcome.jsp">BOLChina</a>, distributing media product online. Although it subsequently closed due to many reasons: the dot come crash, and immaturity of e-commerce market.</p>
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<p>Despite the fact that Der Club Bertelsmann is now history, the Bertelsmann corporation is still connected with our daily lives in its dissolvment. According to <a class="external" href = "http://baifund.com/">BAI, Bertelsmann Asia Investments</a>, we see many familiar names.<a class="external" href="https://mobike.com/global/"> Mobike</a>, a bike sharing company; <a class="external"href="https://douban.com">Douban</a>, a media platform for contents related to music, books, and film; <a class="external" href="https://www.lagou.com/">Lagou</a>, a hiring platform. The list continues. </p>
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</section>
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<section id="gallery">
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<img id ="storefront" src="img/bertelsmann/storefront_closed.jpg" alt="storefront_closed"></img>
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<img id="catalog" src="img/bertelsmann/catalog.jpg" alt="catalog"></img>
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<img id="card" src="img/bertelsmann/card.jpg" alt="card"></img>
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<img id="truck" src="img/bertelsmann/book_truck.jpg" alt="book_truck"></img>
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<img id="parade" src="img/bertelsmann/member_parade.jpg" alt=""></img>
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<img id="investment" src="img/bertelsmann/investment.jpg" alt="investment"></img>
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<footer id="gallery">The Bertelsmann chrnology revisted in photography archive: closed storefronts, catalogs back in the day, membership card; the Lesering bookclub bus in resemblance of icecream trucks, a parade, and Bertelsmann's new life as embodied as investments in myriads of companies.</footer>
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</section>
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<section id="network">
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<h1>How to Archive Disintegrated Network?</h1>
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<p><a class="colleague" href="http://nothat.bad.mn">"A digital network is alive, fully in motion, unstable, ever growing, decaying, dying, restarting.How do we publish that?"</a> is a question raised by my colleague Rita from XPUB. She developed a domentation tool to publish network status in its perished form, which we tend to neglect.</p>
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<p>To review network in decay is to rewrite digital network's ontology. I didn't think of digital network as alive or deceased beings before. The <a class="external" href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> provided a glimpse to BOLChina's appearance in 2004. As today, BOLChina as a DNS no longer active.</p>
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