Vehicles move in the rain on a road in Haidian District, Beijing, capital of China, on July 29, 2023. Impacted by Typhoon Doksuri, the fifth typhoon of this year, heavy rainfall has hit regions in northern China, including Beijing, Hebei and Shandong. Photo:Xinhua

Hundreds of publishing warehouses in Zhuozhou Park, North China's Hebei Province have been badly damaged by torrential rain, causing heavy economic losses. 

Countless books were soaked after rain leaked into the warehouses of many publishing houses and book-selling companies. 

"There are still more than 80 centimeters of water in Zhuozhou logistics park as of Monday, so we need to take a canoe to enter the park," a clerk surnamed Ran from CN Time Books told the Global Times. 

Ran said about 3.6 million of the publisher's books have been damaged by the flood, causing losses of "over 200 million yuan ($27.7 million)." 

BooksChina.com, the biggest online book store in China, revealed 400 million of its books were soaked in the Zhuozhou warehouses, saying it was "the most devastating damage in the company's 25-year history," in a message on its Sina Weibo official account.  

Zhuozhou is a hub for the publishing industry near the Beijing Southwest Logistics Center, and it covers an area of 400 acres. 

BooksChina.com moved its warehouse center to Zhuozhou in 2018. Since the warehouse flooded on August 1, nearly 80 percent of the books have been damaged, including a number of rare, out-of-print and vintage titles. These books are relatively niche, not mass bestsellers. The number of books per edition is small, and when they are damaged, there is no longer any call to reprint them, according to media reports. 

The companies are trying to find ways to make up for the losses. Huang Ping, CEO of BooksChina, interacted with book lovers in a live streaming session on August 4. Many readers are helping the company by buying pre-sale goods.

"We will transfer the newly printed books to the new warehouse in Tianjin and salvage the losses through pre-sales," Ran noted. 

Zhuozhou became a cluster for book depots thanks to its favorable location. Zhuozhou is close to Beijing, with convenient transportation. It is also located in the core area of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei synergistic development, and has convenient conditions for fast logistics and distribution with Beijing. This allows library distributors to set up warehouses in Zhuozhou to provide book distribution services to libraries and bookstores in Beijing in a convenient and efficient manner.

As of Monday, there are still villages in Zhuozhou where water has not been pumped out. Dangzhuang Village in Matou Town, located on the border between Zhuozhou and Beijing, is the area that has suffered the heaviest flooding, according to media reports.