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.”
