{"id":78,"date":"2005-03-13T12:13:11","date_gmt":"2005-03-13T04:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=78"},"modified":"2005-09-17T23:15:21","modified_gmt":"2005-09-17T15:15:21","slug":"book-sales-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2005\/book-sales-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"book sales in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The World’s Biggest Book Market”<\/a>, a piece in the New York Times about book sales in China:<\/p>\n

They’re poring over cartoons — translations of ”Calvin and Hobbes” and of Japanese manga — and the locally drawn ”Legend of Nezha” books, which held 10 of the top 11 places on a Chinese best-seller list last year. Others turn the pages of a Garfield English-Chinese dictionary, which contains no entry for lasagna, but one for tofu.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the author is talking about children at this point, the best-seller list isn’t given as specifically children’s books. So think about it: 10 of the 11 best-selling books in China last year were comic books. I have nothing against comic books, but, under such conditions, figures of high book sales don’t really work to support the idea of a high state of literacy. <\/p>\n

The situation isn’t much better in Japan. <\/p>\n

But translations into Chinese make up only 6 percent of the 190,000 books printed in China in 2003. Instead, the world’s fastest-growing book market — adding an estimated $300 million in sales annually — is fueled by textbooks, which account for nearly half of all purchases. (This is according to China’s statistical yearbook and a definitive book on publishing, which offer the most reliable figures available on the Wild West atmosphere of the Chinese book market.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So textbooks — which are required<\/i> purchases — make up half of sales. <\/p>\n

Moreover, I wonder what the percentage of books is in languages other than Mandarin? And of those textbooks, what percent are in or about English? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The World’s Biggest Book Market”, a piece in the New York Times about book sales in China: They’re poring over cartoons — translations of ”Calvin and Hobbes” and of Japanese manga — and the locally drawn ”Legend of Nezha” books, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,15,41,55,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-english","category-literacy","category-mandarin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}