■Wen Dong

According to the Press and Publishing Industry Report 2016, which was released by China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television in July 2017, Chinese publishing industry presented such trends as the following, in year 2016:

The number of copies printed per title keeps rising. The average print run per title is 13,988 copies, 

           more compared to the year of 2015.

In 2016， publishers on the Chinese mainland have released 500,000 titles in total, an increase of 5.1 percent compared with that in 2015; the total print run was 9.04 billion copies, an increase of 4.3 percent. Among which, the reprint titles amounted 238,000, and the copies reached 5.12 billion, respectively increased 10.3 percent and 10.9 percent, while the percentages of reprint books against the total publishing amount have risen 47.5 percent in titles and 56.6 percent in copies.

Those changes are clear indicators that the constant sellers have taken up bigger portion in the market.

    Half of the titles that were top 10 mostly printed in 2016 are about themes of China development and its modes, including Important Speeches by General Secretary Xi Jinping (2016) that was printed 52 million copies.

With children’s books, the fastest increase was seen and the total titles printed reached 44,000, an increase of 19.1 percent. The total copies of children’s books reached 780 million, an increase of 40 percent.

Contemporary Chinese literature like Ordinary World by Lu Yao, and children’s book like The Straw House by Cao Wenxuan, were among the eight original titles that were printed more than 1 million copies in the year.

Digital publishing keeps increasing but traditional publishers took a small percentage in digital business.

In 2016, the income of digital publishing（including online journals, e-books, ring tones, games for mobile phones, online education, online comics & cartoons, and internet advertisements) reached 572.09 billion yuan ($87.08 billion), an increase of 29.9 percent.

Among which, online journals earned 1.75 billion yuan, ebooks 5.2 billion yuan, and digital newspapers 900 million yuan. In total the three had 7.85 billion yuan, but they only took up 1.4 percent of the digital products.

The numbers tell that it still takes time for traditional publishers to be fully digitalized.

China has copyrights to 11,133 titles sold to overseas markets in 2016, an increase of 6.3 percent. 

9811 titles among which were copyrights to print books, with increase of 10.7 percent, and 1047 were to digital publications, gaining a big-scale balance in trade surplus.

The country in all has exported $110.1 million worth of books, newspaper, journals, audio products, and digital publications, an increase of 5 percent. 

$30.55 million worth of digital publications have been exported, an increase of 29.1 percent compared to that in 2015, and amounted for 27.7 percent of total exported products in 2016.

Reading of digital and print contents rises.In 2016, the comprehensive reading rate of the country reached 79.9 percent, a small increase from that in 2015.

66.1 percent  of the adult Chinese read on mobile phones, an increase of 6.1 percent. 58.8 percent of all Chinese had habit of reading in the year, an increase of 0.4 percent. But to the youngsters of the country, 85 percent of them had the habit of reading, an increase of 3.9 percent.

Online audio books has become trendy new way of “reading”, with 17 percent of Chinese would go for the listening of books and other audible contents.

 (translated by Mei Jia)