The first debate of industry leaders, based on the Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry, found an audience of over 150 publishing professionals at the first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010. Co-organized by Livres Hebdo, buchreport, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller, and kicked off with some key findings of the Global Ranking that [...]

The yearly top revenue based ranking of Chinese writers by Danwei provides, just as in previous editions, some highly interesting (and entertaining) insights in how the Chinese fans and readers are ticking. Don’t only go for the top few names, but read the by-lines, and occasionally check back grounds for the names listed – and [...]

Tracking significant milestones of how Chinese literature and publishing interacts with the West, we can refer to reports in the Hollywood reporter and The Bookseller that Jiang Rong’s novel “Wolf Totem” is going to be turned into a major movie by French director Jean Jacques Annaud. As The Bookseller reports, The film will be made [...]

Together with Miha Kovac of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, we did a survey on book bestseller lists in seven major European markets over the past 12 months The top 40 writers divide into 13 writing in English, and 27 writing in other – European – languages, with Swedish (8), French (5) as the strongest, [...]

Is China ready for the next move in allowing publishers to just mind about their own business? It seems so. The official China news agency Xinhua reports refering to China Daily: “About six or seven press and publishing giants with annual revenues of more than 10 billion yuan (1.46 billion U.S. dollars) will be set [...]

This week’s NYTimes Sunday Book Review focuses on new books from Chinese authors, including: ‘The Vagrants‘, by YIYUN LI Reviewed by PICO IYER ‘China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation’ By XINRAN Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER ‘Brothers‘ By YU HUA Reviewed by JESS ROW (with a portrait of the writer in the Sunday Magazine. Tweet

While it is frightening to see in this very moment how the new Mandarin hotel next to Rem Kohlhas’ CCTV tower is burning, I was checking all kinds of sources on news with regard to China’s publishing landscape. Friends told me that the crisis so far did not have any knock out impact on the [...]

With all the ambition and enthusiasm and curiosity I met among Chinese publishers, the answer to this question may remain ambivalent – yet it also requires more in depth research. When I discussed the list of publishers who prepare to go public with Hong OuYang, the energetic and very well informed editor-in-chief of China Publishing [...]

Writing literature online has a substantial tradition in China, going back to the 1990s, and the most famous site was certainly www.rongshuxia.com (or “Under the Banyan Tree“), and a report in China Daily recounted already in 2004:  “According to Lu Jinbo, chief editor of the website, it used to receive two or three articles a [...]

Here are some more Chinese publishing groups who prepare to go public and, as mentioned already, take note how many of them are procincial groups: Schanghai Century Publishing Group Jiangsu Publishing Group Anhui Publishing Group Hunan Publishing Group and the distribution division of the central state run media group Xinhua. This will trigger an interesting [...]