My Own Private
China
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MARCH 2004)
It
was a sign of the times last month when, at a three-day
meeting in Beijing that brought 170 Chinese publishers
together with a group of US industry veterans, the Communist
Party commissar dropped in on the event — and participants
barely raised an eyebrow at the apparatchik’s visit.
Yes, a “private book industry” is fast developing in
this nation, despite the occasional political intrigue,
and a front-row seat was offered to the American contingent
led by Robert Baensch, Director of the Center
for Publishing at NYU, and author of The Publishing
Industry in China, along with Nielsen BookScan’s
Jim King, Texere’s Myles and Lee
Thompson, and Ingram’s Peter Clifton.
Sponsored by GAPP, the General Administration
of Press & Publication, which officially oversees
publishing in China, the trip took visitors to Beijing
and Hong Kong to scout local retailing conditions and
brief China’s book trade on the best practices of the
global publishing scene.
On that score, publishers from every sector of the industry
attended the American group’s “pretty basic” presentations,
according to the visitors. Jim King’s talk, for instance,
outlined the difference between commission and house
reps, and how they’re compensated. Publishers were fascinated
by the potential that an Ingram might offer to China,
and partnering was a topic of intense discussion. Lee
Thompson couldn’t get over “how open, how smart, how
aggressive” her Chinese counterparts were, particularly
in the practical aspects of publishing and distribution.
Their enterprise and entrepreneurism “were extraordinary,”
despite government controls, she said.
And speaking of the extraordinary, you can’t dismiss
the vigor of the government-run mega-bookshops known
as Book Center or Book City (see PT, 2/03). Though
there are four times as many privately owned shops —
57,000 at last count — Book Centers appear more jam-packed
than Christmas in a New York bookstore, says King. About
30,000 people blaze through the Beijing Book Center
every day, while Shanghai’s Book City boasts seven floors
of books, most of which are in Chinese, plus a number
of imported English-language titles leaning toward science,
engineering, computing, and language (Who Moved My
Cheese? has sold 1.2 million copies). Popular translations
are on tap, too, with Band of Brothers by Stephen
Ambrose racking up 400,000 copies in a year and
piles of Da Vinci Code all around. Chinese books are
published in paperback with a government-subsidized
cost of $3 to $4, while imports run about $10. The low
prices have proven a challenge to Bertelsmann,
which snapped up 40% of the 21st Century Book Chain
Co. in December, becoming the first nationwide joint-venture
book retailer in China.
Better industry intelligence may improve the book trade,
now that a company similar to Nielsen BookScan has begun
to operate in China. Called Open Book, it collects
data from 160 government-run retailers and sells the
reports to publishers. Data collection is complicated
by the government issuance of all ISBNs, however. As
numbers are not handed out freely, publishers sometimes
reuse the same ISBN for several titles. And there are
other quirks of the system. As part of a national effort
to bolster education among the rural population of 900
million, for instance, the Party “is working on a long-term
publishing plan for rural markets and a plan to grant
more book numbers for books targeting rural areas,”
according to Business Daily Update, which notes
that the distribution network in cities has grown threefold
in the past decade, but shrank by 40 percent in the
countryside.
But there’s hope, at least for the unpublished. Last
month the new “China On-line Manuscripts Trading Centre”
reported it had signed up more than 100,000 writers
and editors who swap rights to their unpublished novels
and other works over the Internet. As one investor put
it, the millions of Chinese pining for their big literary
break are simply “a huge business opportunity to tap.”
©2004
Publishing Trends
