Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature Win Leaves China’s E-Commerce Sites Out of Stock

Many Chinese e-commerce sites are celebrating Mo Yan's Nobel literature win - but have run out of his most famous works.

China’s e-commerce sites are struggling to meet demand for the books of Mo Yan after the author last night became the first Chinese resident national [1] to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The prolific writer sure has a lot of books that people can choose from, but his most famous full-length works, such as Frog and Red Sorghum, are largely sold out on China’s major online stores, such as Tmall, Dangdang (NYSE:DANG), and Amazon China (NASDAQ:AMZN).

For example, on Tmall, many of the suppliers in that online mall will sell you the book right now, but you’ll have to wait for shipping. For example, this product page for Frog is seeing orders at the rate of about one every two minutes even though there’s a clear warning in large red text that the novel “will ship in about one week’s time.”

All Mo Yan's top novels are sold out on Dangdang.com and need to be reserved (Click to enlarge)

Meanwhile on Amazon China, the same title is also all sold out – but other Mo Yan works like Wine Republic are still in stock. Dangdang seems to have the severest lack of stock with nearly every title having an ominous purple button in place of the checkout icon (pictured right) – meaning the book is available only to reserve but not to buy and have shipped immediately.

Despite the shortages, many e-commerce sites in China that sell books are running special pages or splash-links in tribute to Mo’s Nobel win, such as the one pictured above on Alibaba’s Tmall.com.

Mo’s award from the Swedish Academy is not entirely uncontroversial either at home or overseas. Today’s Guardian book section points out that some critics view Mo Yan – despite the acclaimed “hallucinatory realism” of his prose, which often draws comparisons to the work of Gabriel García Márquez – as intellectually weak for not speaking up on some sensitive political issues that plague China. Nonetheless, the win will be a major boost for Chinese literature – and also for Mo’s publishers, once they’ve finally cranked up the presses and shipped out more of his top novels.

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