The who's who of foreign publishing companies appearing at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) last week testifies to the allure of China's burgeoning imported book market.

For the 550 major foreign publishers from 50 countries attending Asia's biggest book fair, it was an opportunity to seek partnerships and negotiate sales opportunities, copyright transactions and translation deals. There were 639 Chinese publishers present and international publishers were excited by the growing opportunities.

"The Chinese market is a promising market, and the Beijing International Book Fair becomes more and more important every year," said Moritz Thommen, director of sales and distribution for Berlin-based biomedical publisher S. Karger AG.

In fulfilling its WTO commitments, China opened up to foreign investment in printing, publication distribution and wholesale. This has triggered an international publishing boom, and foreign publishers are eager to make headway in the world's largest publishing market. Chinese spend more than US$150 million annually on more than 14 million imported titles, according to Xinhua News Agency. "China is one of the final frontiers for foreign publishers," said Jon Marlinowski, vice-president of American Collective Stand (ACS) Inc, a service company that helps US publishers handle international exhibitions.

He said most of the 150 plus companies ACS represented at BIBF came to find Chinese counterparts for copyright trades.

Most foreign companies at BIBF publish academic materials, which are in great demand since Chinese libraries and universities are looking to bulk up their collections of English academic books.

Linda Empringham, sales director of the Netherlands-based Brill Academic Publishers, believed this accounted for Brill's success in China. "We only started to come into China in the last few years, but since we started to do that, sales have gone up," she said.

In October, Brill will release its latest project in partnership with a Chinese publishing house, Beijing-based Science Press.

"The Complete Collection of Jades Unearthed in China" is a 15 volume hardcover series featuring photographs of more than 4,000 Chinese jade archaeological artifacts published both in Chinese and English.

Empringham said Brill would continue to invest in the Chinese market, but believed it would take time to develop ties with Chinese companies, libraries and universities. "It's not a huge, explosive growth every year, but gradually, it's an upward trend," she said. "China is a long-term proposition for any company."

While academic books have traditionally dominated BIBF, other publishers, such as Penguin Books, are entering the Chinese market.

"The imported book market at this point is of interest to us because we view it as a space that is rapidly growing and where demand for English titles is currently greater than the supply. We are seeing great growth in our sales of English language titles into China," said Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin China.

Penguin's English titles might have a bright future, but on the eve of BIBF they announced they would release their Black Classics series in Chinese in partnership with the Chongqing Publishing Group.

The project is the first to bring Chinese experts on board to write introductions explaining how each classic pertains to Chinese society.

Starting with 10 titles published in November 2006, 15 titles will be published each year after May 2007. Understanding that China is both the world's fastest growing publishing and Internet markets, Penguin will release the translated classics in e-book format in 2007.

"Chinese consumers are early adaptors of technology, and as such, they are likely to be more open to reading books in e-formats at an earlier stage than many readers in the UK or US," Lusby said.

Online-reading

The country's readers are exhibiting an emergent enthusiasm for online reading, in sharp contrast to their reduced paper book reading, according to a survey released at the BIBF.

In a country with the population of 1.3 billion, more than 1 per cent of its people now read online. And the group is expanding, the survey on domestic readership conducted biennially by Chinese Institute of Publishing Science said.

"As a result, we are very aware of the need to have a solid digital strategy to support all our publishing projects in China and book publishers everywhere must broaden their idea of what a book is," Lusby added.

In her eyes, a book is no longer something that is only "printed on paper." It is for publishers to adapt their methods of working accordingly, she said. Penguin is not the only publisher to realize the change.

Almost at the same time last week, Springer, the Germany-based largest scientific book publisher in the world, introduced its new version of Springerlink, an online reading database, to Chinese readers at the BIBF.

In addition to millions of academic papers, the new link also offers online access to more than 11,000 e-books. And the company said from this year on, it would make available digital versions of 3,000 new books each year, becoming the largest digital scientific book publisher in the world. The ambitious plan also includes digitalizing some English versions of books written by Chinese scientists or scholars, thanks to the increasing influence of Chinese authors.

Springer CEO Derk Haank made a special flight to Beijing last week for the book fair and highlighted the upcoming of new e-books: "E-books can help stimulate sales of paper books. We have great interest in it, especially to promote it in Asia."

The company's determination to digitalize its publications is even strengthened by the rapidly growing Chinese readership of Springerlink.

(China Daily September 7, 2006)