Having become a significant player in publishing with some 220,000
titles hitting the market annually, China still has a long way to
go before establishing itself as a major international player in
the industry, according to Wu Shulin, vice director of the General
Administration of Press and Publication, who was speaking at the
China Publishing Development High-level Forum on Sunday.
Every year China publishes around 220,000 titles, of which
130,000 are new, and the total number in print now stands at
400,000, said Wu. He stressed that publishing in China had reached
a significant scale but lacked an overall competitive strength and
was a long way behind advanced publishing countries of the
world.
One of the important factors in evaluating a country's
publishing sector is whether it has published a large number of
books reflecting social progress and scientific achievements, which
usually assist in the development of society, Wu observed. However,
at present most of such books published in China are not the
creation of Chinese but have been purchased from foreign publishers
at a high price. ?
According to Wang Hanhua, president of Joyo.com (a well-known
e-commerce website in China), the US only publishes 70,000 new
titles each year. The much higher number in this regard does not
mean that China was already strong in publishing. The industry
places heavy significance on quality rather than quantity, he said.
Relevant statistics show that the total stock of unsold books in
China has now reached 50 billion copies.?
Another headache for Chinese publishers is difficulty in getting
payment from bookstores. Without these payments the publishers are
unable to pay authors. The debt triangle between publishers,
bookstores and authors has become a "bottle neck" in the industry
and appears to hold back further development. ?
There are views that Chinese book prices are too low?--
just?one-seventh to a quarter of those charged in advanced
countries. However, there are also concerns that if prices go up
readers may refuse to buy.
According to the "Readers Survey in the Internet Era 2006"
jointly released by the Founders Electronics Group and the China
PC Journal, 60 percent of readers get access to books through
the Internet, Wang said.
Facing changes in reading habits due to wide use of the
Internet, publishers have been adjusting their marketing
strategies. By May 2006 around 400 publishers had started
e-publishing. Fudan University Press has published over 3,000
e-book titles and is actively studying the multiple applications of
the system. The Beijing Publishing Group had 750 e-book titles in
2005 and can publish printed and e-editions
simultaneously.?
(China.org.cn by Xu Lin, June 20, 2006)
