A New Binding?
According to The Economist, China’s government is taking steps to stop subsidies to publishers who are hemorrhaging in red ink. It had disabled the rights of 10,000-odd publishing houses to publish books and forced them to merge with only 600 private companies. Only these private companies, which have state-ties, will be allocated a quota of serial numbers that can be legally printed. This means that the final decision whether or not to publish a particular title lie on them.
The article seems to imply that this is another method used by the government to impose stringent control over information that is available to the citizens. These private companies are usually profit-driven and favour the production of bestsellers or popular textbook titles, rather than intellectual books that do not guarantee high sales. Even if the publishing house wants to publish a definite bestselling book but has controversial political views, few of these companies would allow this to happen because they risk being fined or suffer a reduction in book quotas .
A new binding; Publishing mergers in China: The Economist article
To read The Economist article in full,
- Log into LexisNexis Academic under NTU database page
- Under Search Terms, type in“A new binding; Publishing mergers in China”,
- Select “Major U.S. and World Publications” under the Search Within field.
- Determine the date range , e.g. Date is between May 23 2009 and May 29 2009.
Run the search and you will be able to retrieve all the articles in full text!
