In an Age When Tech Enthusiasts Read on Their Phones, She Makes Them a Print Magazine | 100 People With Ideas

In the end, what she thinks about most is how to give readers good content.

Li Ting picked a contradiction to build a company on.

For the core audience of digital reading — tech enthusiasts — she made a mook series called Offline (《离线》).

Offline runs to nearly 200 pages and weighs about half a jin, roughly 250 grams, in the hand. Its paper body does have one link to technology: it is exactly as long and as wide as an iPad Air.

But Offline is still a paper book. Its information exists as plant fiber tangled tightly with ink molecules, not as electrons moving between floating-gate transistors. That runs against what tech enthusiasts want — they like electrons and electronic devices. In Li Ting's words, "they wish they could handle everything on a mobile device."

The mook has kept going anyway. Since Offline began in August 2014 it has put out three issues, on gaming, hackers and science fiction, each selling about 7,000 copies — still not enough to cover publishing costs.

By Li Ting's math, the book has to sell 20,000 copies to break even. Sales have not grown much through the third issue, but she says things are slowly picking up: more companies come to them to talk about working together.

In Offline's office by Beijing's East Fifth Ring Road, the startup air is still thick. Office may be the wrong word — it is a co-working space. They have no space of their own yet; a dozen or so people rent two rows of desks fenced off with partitions, a bit over ten square meters in all.

The meeting room is shared too. During our interview, two separate groups wandered in after getting the booking time wrong. But Li Ting, who used to work at Zhanlu Culture and Dongxi Wenku, seems at ease in this kind of workplace.

How an Issue of Offline Gets Made

Offline is a mook, a form of publication between a book and a magazine; the English word is a blend of magazine and book. It has to come out on a schedule like a magazine while holding the depth of a book. The better-known Chinese mooks include Duku (《读库》) and Zhiri (《知日》), both published about once a month.

Interior pages of Offline

Offline's ideal cycle is about two months, and that is already the optimistic estimate — no issue has yet appeared on the date planned. That may be because, unlike most Chinese mooks, which lean toward the magazine side, every issue of Offline reads like a book.

Each issue has a set theme, and each theme comes out of discussion across the whole team. Several themes may surface at once early on. The Offline: Science Fiction issue, for instance, only came out this May, but the idea for it was born the year before.

Which theme goes into production first has nothing to do with the team liking it more than the others. It goes first because the thinking behind it is riper and easier to carry out. Every issue of Offline is a product of restraint: a book is only so thick, the word count only so large, and pouring too much into one theme can even backfire.

Li Ting's team overdid it once, on 1024, the predecessor to Offline. Work on that mook started in June 2013 and it did not come out until the end of that year; it was meant to run about 120,000 characters and ended up at a full 170,000, which put heavy reading pressure on readers. Mostly that happened because so much effort went in early on that it became hard to cut anything from any piece with a clear head.

Once the theme is set, the question is how to present it. Take the latest issue of Offline, on artificial intelligence — a field tech companies have hyped to death while real progress stays limited. Li Ting wanted a different way in.

In the end they decided to put Ray Kurzweil and Andrew Ng, two men whose views collide, in the same book, and to run their opposing positions as the spine of the AI theme. The former wrote The Singularity Is Near and heads an engineering team at Google whose purpose is unclear; the latter founded Google Brain and later joined Baidu to lead work on Baidu Brain.

After the main interview subjects, the backups and the other related pieces are settled, the work is interviewing, commissioning, and buying articles from writers abroad. Every interview has one person in charge, and if it cannot be done in time they turn to a backup subject.

To cut out the middleman and save money, Offline goes to the author first when buying content, and only to the outlet that published the piece if that fails. Since most of the pieces they pick are in English, when they cannot reach the foreign publisher either, they try the agency holding the Chinese-language rights.

Once a piece is licensed it is translated, and with that the content side of each mook is finished. Only layout and design stand between it and the press. The cover and page design for Offline are the work of the well-known graphic designer Yang Linqing. The team trusts him completely, so every issue has been designed start to finish by his hand.

Interior pages of Offline

Design on each book starts the moment the theme is fixed. Offline and Yang Linqing go back and forth beforehand, and once the articles are locked, the person responsible for each piece talks with him one on one, explaining why that piece was chosen and what is in it, to help him get the tone of the whole book.

That working exchange is what gives every book a design of its own. The consistency of the design also lends the separate articles a curious kinship, and strengthens what makes Offline a book rather than a magazine.

How a Sociology PhD Student Ended Up Doing This

Li Ting's first tie to technology may have been chance, but her ending up making a mook about technology was not.

After her undergraduate degree in China, Li Ting went to Lancaster University in Britain to study sociology. In the second year of her PhD she decided she was not built for deep, narrow research, dropped out and came home to work, hoping to widen her interests. She had chosen sociology in the first place because she thought it would cross paths with many other fields.

Back in China in 2007, Li Ting joined Zhanlu Culture. Zhanlu was still a startup then, and as a book editor she could choose foreign-language books worth publishing on her own. She was the one who brought The Economic Naturalist (《牛奶可乐经济学》), a huge hit at the time, into China; the book even set off a wave of popular-economics publishing.

As Zhanlu Culture grew, it settled into its own publishing territory, the way every traditional publisher does. To raise the hit rate, editors' say over what to acquire was gradually narrowed.

So Li Ting joined another startup publisher, Dongxi Wenku, part of Yeeyan. There she planned and published a run of technology books; the clearest examples are leading the translation of Steve Jobs and launching the Yeeyan Gutenberg Project.

But in planning those English books she kept hitting the same wall. Her team could often spot a promising book worth bringing to China before other publishers did, yet the right to publish it still had to come through a rights agent.

And a rights agent wants one thing: a good price. The result was always the same — the books they had found ended up bought by bigger publishers with deeper pockets. Those publishers had their own fixed schedules and no room to bring the book out right away, so some genuinely good books were shelved and forgotten.

That is what finally pushed her to make a mook. A mook gathers articles around one theme, and getting the rights to a single article is far easier than getting the rights to a whole book. Using one article as the unit of reading also fits how people read now.

Probably because of Li Ting's long years in publishing, both 1024, back at Dongxi Wenku, and Offline today look more like books than magazines.

From Book Editor to Company Founder

Li Ting speaking at a GeekPark conference

Having left Dongxi Wenku to set up on her own, Li Ting is no longer just a book editor. The whole team is her responsibility now.

"Every issue of Offline comes with an advance on royalties for 5,000 copies, and after that every 1,000 copies are settled separately. On each book sold, the publisher gives us about ten points — 10 percent — so on a 45-yuan book we make 4.5 yuan," says Li Ting, who has worked out to the last detail how much they can earn. "We did the math ourselves: 20,000 copies is exactly the break-even number."

She is just as careful with money going out. How much to pay for the rights to each piece, and how to find translators who are cheaper but better, are questions she turns over every day. In conversation she was happiest talking about tricks for saving money, and a little embarrassed when the subject turned to advertising.

Because it has gathered readers who care about technology, Offline already earns some income from live events. In Li Ting's words, "at least the events don't lose money."

She also described another plan in the works: selling merchandise. The first Offline merchandise to go on sale will be posters, some made in-house to go with each issue, more of them licensed from designers abroad.

"There are a lot of restrictions in poster rights talks — some artists won't let you sell on other platforms," Li Ting told QDaily about this long-delayed project. "Sometimes it really does feel thankless. Plenty of these posters are already pirated on Taobao."

The talks will continue anyway; piracy is not what Li Ting wants to be doing. The next new product may be the one closest to Offline's own subject: e-books.

Li Ting worked on the e-book edition of Steve Jobs, but she is no zealot for the format. She still believes paper, as a medium, can carry what electrons cannot: "Beyond a fondness for paper itself, a book as a paper object has evolved over a very long time. It has a logic of its own."

Even so, Offline has been preparing for e-books from the start: every content license it buys includes digital rights. On Amazon you can already find digital editions of some of the longer pieces from the first three issues, at 2.99 yuan each.

If Offline ever goes digital, it will be designed again from scratch, because not every layout suits the screen most people read on — the smartphone.

But e-book or paper book, good content still matters most. Li Ting says the most important thing for Offline right now is still to make the content good.