Yan is a few and three words, which are separated from the traditional Chinese character "設". 12 years ago, Yanji was still a community bookstore called "Today's Reading", and after several changes and innovations, it has developed into a lifestyle experience space integrating physical bookstores, coffee culture, cultural and creative products, literary salons, and special experience stores.

Hangzhou Yanji is located in Raffles City in Qianjiang New Town, with an area of 3,200 square meters. In terms of design, the bookstore takes "seeds" as the design concept and the original wood color as the keynote, and is full of design elements such as wheat waves and terraced fields.

At the entrance of the bookstore is a list of popular books, and most of the books are works by best-selling authors such as Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino. In Yanji, you can also find a lot of original books from Hong Kong, Taiwan or abroad, but in such books, there are not many sample books that can be read when they are opened, and most of the original foreign books are art magazines, and there are few literary works. If you want to read a literary book, you need to go to a less conspicuous area of the bookstore. Literary books are divided into foreign literature and Asian literature, and the subdivisions are slightly confusing, making it difficult for readers to find books.

Yanji has a collection of more than 80,000 books, mainly literary and art books, but from the perspective of book selection, too much attention is paid to bestsellers and popular books, and at the same time, the reading materials in the children's area are relatively single, and parent-child picture books are scarce.

The bookstore team has also launched a series of activities related to the theme of reading, such as reading a diverse world, the window sill of readers, etc., one of the most local characteristics is the combination of "Hangzhou" and "reading" to tell about Hangzhou scenery and Hangzhou writers.

In addition to the book area, another part of Yanjiyou is a life platform operated in a "shop-in-shop" model. There are areas such as a coffee bar, a flower shop, and a pottery area on the platform, where both readers and passers-by can stop and enjoy another form of cultural space. Yanji also holds a variety of cultural events every year, not only celebrity lectures, but also clothing brand events or other new product launches.

In other words, selling books is no longer the main purpose, but more like a incidental thing. When we only look at Yanjiyou by the standard of "physical bookstore", the problems of few types of books and too noisy environment become more and more obvious.