Are airport bookstores also about to be "taken over" by AI?

Airport bookstores have also been "encroached on" by AI.

On November 1, while waiting for my flight at Ningbo Lishe Airport, I walked into a bookstore out of habit. Located in Terminal T2, the store is fairly spacious. Its most prominent wall is lined with AI toys themed around cute pets and companionship, next to electronic products such as children's learning machines and headphones, as well as cultural and creative commodities like fridge magnets, with very few books on display.

I wandered around for more than ten minutes, and only a handful of customers walked in, all of whom took a quick glance and left in a hurry.

Before that, I noticed at Terminal T3 of Beijing Capital International Airport that the most prominent billboards on the departure floor were all occupied by AI office applications including Doubao Work, Qianwen Office, and Baidu Buddy.

36Kr previously disclosed that during the "cloud vendor channel battle" in July 2025, Alibaba Cloud's airport advertising campaign reached the 100-million-yuan level, while Baidu Cloud secured the most expensive advertising spot on the arrival floor of Capital Airport T3, with an annual rent starting at 10 million yuan, whose previous tenant was Dior.

Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport is one of the airports with the most concentrated AI advertisements in the past two years. As reported by City Express in March 2025, the advertising spots there have shifted from consumer goods to competition between large model (applications) and cloud computing services.

It took large model vendors less than two years to buy up all the billboards in airports. So are the prime locations in airport bookstores also being "occupied" by AI?

In fact, operating an airport bookstore is not a profitable business.

I have not found relevant data on the rent of this bookstore at Ningbo Airport. For reference, Shanghai Airport Authority released a leasing announcement on its official website last July: a 236-square-meter bookstore space in Hongqiao Airport Terminal T2 was charged under the "rent + operation right transfer fee" model, which translates to an annual cost of 2.57 million yuan, equivalent to more than 7,000 yuan per day.

If a bookstore only sells books, a book priced at 59 yuan is purchased from the publisher at a 40% to 35% discount, so the profit for selling one copy is 20 to 24 yuan. Calculated at a 35% discount, the store has to sell 350 books a day, generating a revenue of just over 20,000 yuan, just to cover the daily rent of the space, not to mention labor, utilities, and renovation costs.

In addition to rent, airport bookstores have clear restrictions on their business scope. For example, the books and periodicals bidding section of Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport clearly stipulates that the store can sell books, audiovisual products, stationery, toys, electronic products, craft souvenirs and travel supplies, and books and periodicals products shall account for no less than 30% of all goods.

Some airports set even stricter rules. The bookstore bidding section of Yantai Airport T2 allows the sale of cultural and creative products and tea, but explicitly prohibits the sale of electronic products and children's toys.

Airport bookstores are naturally supposed to sell books, but most of the best-selling books are success-themed self-help books, and it is non-book products with high gross profit such as cultural and creative goods, U-shaped pillows, learning machines and headphones that actually support the revenue.

Moreover, the business of airport bookstores has been shrinking. Take CITIC Books as an example. In 2013, it entered 17 domestic airports at one go and opened 137 bookstores. According to the 2025 annual report of CITIC Publishing, as of June 2025, it only had 28 stores nationwide; by August 2026, CITIC Books' airport stores only remained in operation in five cities: Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Chen Wei, Chairman of CITIC Publishing, said bluntly in an internal speech in early 2025 that bookstores are not a very profitable business. But he also emphasized that CITIC Publishing will continue to take bookstores as its core main business.

Since the business is so hard to run, why don't bookstores just withdraw from airports? CITIC Publishing's 2025 annual report divided the responsibilities of different types of stores: business stores dig deep into enterprise services, community stores expand government and enterprise cooperation, and the task of airport stores is to "give full play to the efficiency of brand display".

To put it bluntly, the main task of airport bookstores is not to sell books. As long as the tens of thousands of people passing through the terminal see the brand sign, the store is not operating in vain.

It should be noted that airports gather a large number of business travelers, who are precisely the target users willing to pay for large models and AI products, including enterprise and government decision-makers, which is a value that no other form of outdoor advertising can match.

This value has also been targeted by AI toys and learning machines. Most of these products enter the stores through joint operation: the brand side supplies the goods, the bookstore provides the counter, and the two parties share the revenue according to a certain percentage of the turnover after the products are sold. Unsold products can be returned to the brand side, so the bookstore does not need to advance funds or bear inventory risks.

For bookstores, the profit from selling a 399-yuan toy or a 1999-yuan learning machine is far higher than that from selling a book priced at 50 to 60 yuan, and there is no need to advance funds to stock up the goods.

AI products such as AI toys and learning machines are also willing to invest in airport bookstores. On the one hand, the performance of online channels is not ideal. The Hangzhou Consumer Rights Protection Commission disclosed in May this year that the 7-day no-reason return rate of some AI companion trendy toys reached 30%, and the return rate in live streaming rooms is even higher.

In addition, selling goods online requires paying for traffic first. An operation manual circulated among AI toy distributors calls pure e-commerce investment a "meat grinder". What is more troublesome is price comparison: for the same product, if you do not lower the price, no one will place an order, but if you lower the price, there will be no profit left.

On the other hand, offline airport bookstores have two unique advantages: first, no one compares prices, passengers take the goods and leave, and will not stand in front of the counter to search for the same product online. Second, they can set a higher offline price. The aforementioned operation manual also ranks offline channels in order: online e-commerce, shopping mall counters, and finally stores in airports and high-speed railway stations.

Among them, CITIC Books in airport bookstores is known as the "main force in national airport and high-speed railway hubs", while digital collection stores in terminals are defined as "high-premium gift nodes", where a product priced at 399 yuan can be sold for 599 yuan to 899 yuan.

With books not selling well on the one hand, and AI products that can provide higher revenue share and do not violate the business scope regulations on the other, AI toys, learning machines and other AI products quickly taking over airport bookstores is just a natural trend.

However, whether the AI products placed on the shelves can be sold well is another matter. In the more than ten minutes I stayed there, I did not see a single child stop in front of the counter; these products need to be turned on, connected to the Internet, tried for a few dialogues, or explained by the store staff for customers to understand, which is far less attractive to children than opening blind boxes.

A more accurate statement for airport bookstores being "occupied" by AI is that the counters are indeed filled with AI products, which are occupied by "tenants" with higher gross profit. In this context, airport bookstores are more like "sublessors".

Therefore, it is still unknown how long these trendy AI products such as AI toys and learning machines can stay in the stores.

In the past two years, companies developing large models and AI hardware have spent most of their money on gaining exposure, that is, large-scale expansion to grab users' attention. An advertising screen in the airport costs tens of millions of yuan a year, which is bought for a glance from passing passengers.

This round of expansion has basically come to an end. Next, they will pay more attention to conversion, that is, whether users will actually make purchases after attracting their attention.

The battle for AI office billboards on the departure floor of Capital Airport Terminal T3, Photo by Tang Chen

Following this trend, what will be the next AI product to appear in airport bookstores?

One possibility is robots. They have already appeared in Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport. At the unmanned convenience store in the waiting area of the ride-hailing Zone A of the airport, the store manager is a humanoid robot. Passengers select products on the screen, scan the code to pay, and the robot shuttles through the shelves to deliver the goods to the pickup port. In August this year, Daxing Airport opened 19 robot application scenarios at one go, ranging from bird repellent patrol to passenger guidance.

However, this already involves the form upgrade of airport bookstores, which will "take over" the entire store. The spacing of bookshelves, moving lines, and power supplies all need to be adjusted accordingly.

At present, the only thing that remains unchanged in airport bookstores is those best-selling success-themed self-help books.

References:

City Express · Orange Persimmon Interactive, "Is Xiaoshan Airport Surrounded by AI Large Models?"

36Kr Intelligent Emergence, "AI Chaos Breaks Out in Airport Advertising"

China Civil Aviation News, "When 'Cyber Travel' Comes into Reality"

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Tang Chen's Notes", Author: Tang Chen, published with authorization from 36Kr.