Taiwan Today

Huang Hsiu-feng (黃秀鳳), like many women in Taiwan, makes twice-a-week trips to her neighborhood beauty sa­lon, where she can sit back and relax, have her hair washed and styled, and come out looking picture perfect all for no more than the price of a magazine. In fact, she even gets a few magazines thrown in: there is always a variety available for every customer to browse through. "While my hair is being done, I like to read the expensive fashion magazines or the entertainment weeklies," she says. "The weeklies are especially fun to read. They always give you tons of gossipy information about the rich and famous. But you don't really want to spend your money on them, do you?"

Some customers go to the beauty sa­lon for the magazines as much as for the hair styling. They even keep track of the issues they've read from week to week. And in between hair salon visits, there is always the local coffee shop, where magazines are practically a part of the menu. By paying just a few dollars for lunch or for an afternoon cafè au lait, customers can enjoy a comfortable and trendy setting while they leaf through a dozen or so publications. They can take their pick from the latest fashion and en­tertainment magazines, as well as current travel, lifestyle, housekeeping, and a va­riety of other monthlies. "When I have to eat alone, I usually come here," says a 35-year-old office worker having lunch at one of the countless coffee shops in downtown Taipei. "The magazines keep me company. And I can catch up on all the latest trends. When I get home from work I'm usually too tired to read maga­zines. Besides, I don't buy them myself."

These, of course, are the kinds of comments that publishers don't like to hear. But the easy availability of free magazines in the island's popular and abundant beauty salons and coffeehouses is a fact of life for the magazine industry in Taiwan—and a major reason why even the best publications have a tough time building subscribers or even indi­vidual sales. While the number of maga­zines published in Taiwan has grown tremendously in the last ten years, sales have remained stagnant. Readers com­plain that prices are too high-up to US$7.50 per copy—and that the content is often superficial and the pages full of ads. What's more, many local publica­tions are printed on thick paper that makes them cumbersome to carry around. "I don't really need to buy maga­zines," says 26-year-old Juan Ai-chun (阮愛石), a professional cellist who en­joys reading the fashion monthlies. "Be­sides, two hundred [Taiwan] dollars per issue is pretty expensive for me, and I don't have room in my apartment to keep so many thick, heavy magazines."

Still, magazines are popular—as long as they are free. And in busy, shop-­filled Taiwan, finding a magazine to read for free is as easy as walking down the street. Many people don't even bother to pay for a shampoo or a cup of coffee, but instead go directly to the bookstore maga­zine rack or to one of the convenience stores that can be found on nearly any city or suburb block. At almost any time of day, they can join a small crowd of read­ers browsing through their favorite maga­zines, a practice that store employees do little to stop. As at the beauty salons, women's publications are one of the big­gest victims. "We have more readers than buyers for these women's magazines," says convenience store manager Su Chi­-lung ( 蘇奇隆), who sometimes has to re­turn worn and ripped copies to the distributor. But nearly any popular publi­cation is up for grabs, be it on cars, pho­tography, parenting, investing, or teenage pop idols.

There are people, however, who pre­fer to read their magazines at home. But even so, there is no need to pay the full price. Instead of the bookstore, readers can make a trip to a street vendor or to Taipei's Kuanghua Market, where inde­pendent dealers, many of them retired servicemen, have for years been selling back issues of magazines. The stores may be small, dim, and disorganized, but browsers can find old copies of nearly any publication available, often for about half the price.

Yet another alternative for budget­ conscious readers is magazine rental com­panies, a phenomenon that started about ten years ago—around the same time magazines became standard fare in beauty salons and coffee shops. The service features weekly home delivery and allows customers to choose about five different magazines every week for around US$2.50 per copy—also far below the re­tail price.

Although renting magazines is an il­legal business, and thus none of these companies is registered with the govern­ment, a number of them are believed to exist in every city on the island. "I still get phone calls from them," says Chiang Ping-yang (姜秉陽), general manager of Kuangtang magazine distribution com­pany. "I can tell it's them by the large number of different magazines they want to subscribe to." If Chiang is suspicious, he refuses the subscriptions. "If I let one maga­zine rental company subscribe through me, I lose one hundred possible customers," he says. "So who gets the profit?"

Some customers, however, are start­ing to become disillusioned with the idea of renting magazines. Chang Fei-fei (張斐斐), who used to rent from a com­pany in the central-island city of Taichung, stopped the service after six months because she often got used, beaten-up copies of limited variety. "Sometimes I even got the same old magazines twice in a month," she says.

But even if rental companies should start to find it harder to keep customers, readers will continue to find ways to read their magazines at a discount. "Most peo­ple in Taiwan seem to enjoy a free lunch," complains Christine Kao (高瑞玲), pub­lisher of the fashion monthly Jasmine. "This I can understand. But does it ever occur to them that what they are doing is actually harmful to the magazine publish­ing industry?" But the public apparently sees it differently. As Chang Fei-fei says, "The publishers themselves should be held responsible, not us readers. They shouldn't have priced their magazines so high in the first place."