Abstract:

The definition of“ crowd-funding” was coined ten years ago. This term has been familiar to academia
and industry in China, and accepted by Chinese official discourse. Nevertheless, further research is still in
need when it comes to the combination of“ crowd-funding” and publishing industry, both theoretically and
practically. This paper is trying to explain how“ crowd-funding” publishing model changed industrial value chain
into value network, transformed terminal publishing products and re-built roles of readers, from the view of industrial
value chain proposed by Michael E.Porter and executed by case study of Zhihu the online community and Lejia’s
crowd-funding book marketing event. Several obstacles and bottleneck problems are mentioned at the same time,
including the drawbacks of crowd-funding platform and restrictions or limitations of publishing system.