Staff Papers
e-publishing in China
A paper by Wan Wong, Asian Collections, National Library of Australia, presented at the 15th ASAA Conference, Canberra, June 29-July 2, 2004.
The e-publishing industry in China started with floppy disks in the mid 1980s. By 1994 more than 1,000 titles have been published on disks. CD-ROMs started to appear since the mid 1990s. During the past few years massive online products are also being produced and marketed overseas. Together with developments in e-commerce and online bookstores, the e-publishing industry will become more and more important. This paper aims to present the e-publishing scene in China at present, with a glimpse of the future.
Definition
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gives the definition of e-publishing, or electronic publishing, as "publishing in which information is distributed by means of a computer network or is produced in a format for use with a computer"
The definition of electronic publishing in the Chinese Regulations on Electronic Publishing, effectively on 1st January, 1998 defines it as "publishing of information on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, CD-I (Interactive), DVD-ROMs, Photo CDs and IC cards".
Both definitions put the focus on the carrier of the information and the need for computers as an access device. In this paper therefore the discussion will be about the main carriers used by e-publishers, namely CD-ROMs (including DVD-ROMs) and online products, which include e-books and full text journal databases.
CD-ROMs
CD-ROM publishing in China started in1993, and has grown tremendously since. In 2002, 4,668 CD-ROM and 18 DVD-ROM titles are published in China, a staggering 96.7% increase over the previous year. In just 10 years, CD-ROMs as a publishing medium has made remarkable progress. This of course is closely related to the proliferation of PCs in universities, schools, offices and homes all over China. Apart from cultural and entertainment content, CD-ROMs were also used as a medium for digitized print materials. The famous "CD-ROM series on documents of Chinese revolutionary history" (Zhongguo ge ming shi dang an wen xian guang pan ku) published by the Electronic Industry Press in 1996 is a classic example. A more recent example is the "Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature" (Si ku quan shu), in which the 1500 volumes in hardcopy are digitized and contained in 175 CD-ROMs. In recent years Chinese acquisitions librarians around the world would also have noticed that there are more and more CD-ROMs attached to printed publications, most of which are reproductions of the printed text. CD-ROMs are also important in science and technology publishing, as well as medical publishing. The People's Health Press, for instance, continues to produce CD-ROMs are part of their routine medical textbook publication schedule. At the end of 2002 there are 116 CD-ROM titles by its electronic publishing arm .
Apart from these one-off products, some publishers, notably serial publishers, are now producing continuing types of CD-ROM products. The People's Daily now has an annual cumulation on CD-ROM, and the periodical abstract service put out by the Information Centre of the China People's University is also produced on quarterly CD-ROMs. These have already been acquired by some libraries here as they are attractive alternatives to the printed version with superior searching capabilities you expect from the electronic medium as well as a lower price tag than the hardcopy. There are also some publishers who provide an online product as well as a CD-ROM product, such as the "Law and legislation database" (Guo jia fa gui shu ju ku) published by the State Information Center of the Chinese government. This half-yearly updated CD-ROM is an offshoot of the laws and legislation posted on the website www.chinalaw.net
In addition there are also CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs of computer softwares and computer games. These have been traditionally the majority of the CD-ROM publishing output. But according to the 2003 China Publishers' Yearbook, most of the CD-ROMs published in the future will be in educational materials, textbooks and cultural topics.
e-books
There are 3 major e-book products on the Chinese market at the moment, namely SuperStar, Founder and Scholar.
SuperStar is a private enterprise established in 1993. At its early stage the company concentrated on the digitizing business, using its own PDG compressing technology to digitize documents for government departments and academic bodies. In 1996 it ventured into the electronic publishing business and produced over 200 products, including some CD-ROMs based on older periodicals and archival documents. I've mentioned the series on revolutionary history above. From the end of 1997 it developed a web-based e-book delivery technology and during July 1998 to Dec. 1999 it established a partnership with the National Library of China (NLC) to digitize 150,000 books to put on the NLC web site. This was the first e-book product on the market and was extremely well received. Soon NLC parted with SuperStar, and the latter continued the e-book product on its own. At the moment SuperStar claims to have over 800,000 digitized titles on offer, divided into various subject areas. Users purchase reader cards to download books to read on PCs using SuperStar's own reading software.
Founder is a much newer competitor, but with a very strong IT background. It originated as a high-tech IT company under Peking University, and now has become a multi-faceted group with still very competitive IT subsidiaries. One of their major IT products is their desktop publishing software, which is being used by over two-thirds of publishing houses in China. This gives them the advantage of obtaining electronic copies of books virtually just with a click. Because they are a late comer there are only about 40,000 e-book titles being offered at the moment, and they are hoping to increase it to over 100,000 by the end of this year, and thereafter by 30-50,000 titles a year. Their e-book product is packaged with an electronic resources management system that can be used by libraries, as well as an online bookshop element that can be used by publishers to offer e-books directly to consumers. Guangxi Normal University Press and the Juvenile & Children's Publishing House, for instance, offer electronic versions of their publishing output online via the Founder Apabi system. Founder is also involved in hardware development for hand held e-book readers. So far in China they have over 500 users and most of the academic libraries in Hong Kong have also signed up with them.
Scholar Digital Technology Co. Ltd. was founded in 1995 and has been focusing on the higher education sector as their primary market, and tailor their products to the needs of academic libraries. There are 200,000 titles now on offer, and Scholar plans to increase their online stock by 60,000 titles each year. It has developed an online circulation system and a collection development system which records the recommendation of librarians and academics, as well as the borrowing frequency by students and number of pages browsed for each title, etc. The system can then generate recommended reading lists, and titles on the lists can be downloaded into the library's server to enable quick access with minimal data storage requirement. On the other hand the titles that don't get used will be deselected after a specified time period and removed from the library server to make way for newer and more used titles.
The e-book market in China seems very lucrative as the vast population and geographical spread makes it very attractive for digital copies of reading materials to be available on the Internet. In a country with very unbalanced regional development e-book products would also be appropriate for readers, including academics and university students, in remote regions where their local public or academic libraries are often not sufficient in meeting their information needs. For academic libraries, purchasing just one e-book product means a huge boost to their collection size, which helps them to obtain accreditation by the government. e-book products also solve the problems of the need to purchase multiple copies. For individuals, access to e-books at their local public libraries means a good saving in financial terms, as books are still considered a bit too expensive to buy for the average Chinese.
Fulltext journal databases
Among the three major fullext journal database providers, Tsinghua Tong Fang is much better known both locally and overseas as its product China Academic Journals (CAJ) is by far the most popular and commercially successful. A number of academic and research libraries in Australia have already subscribed to some of the 9 databases offered by CAJ. This product is attractive in the number of journal titles included, which is 6,100 at present, the speed by which articles are added daily into the database and the easy to use interface. The company deals with individual journal publishers to obtain issues in either printed or electronic formats and has several major processing bases around the country. CAJ has an advantage as part of a government project called "China National Knowledge Infrastructure" (CNKI) launched in 1998. On the English version of their website I quote:
"Launched in 1998, CNKI is a national key project to construct Chinese digital resource system. Its main goal is to digitize all Chinese knowledge-based information resources and create multiple channels for their application."
CNKI contains other online resources such as dissertations, selected newspaper articles, conference proceedings, patents, etc. The company is also in the process of launching its own e-book product within this year and at a later stage, its own ebook reader. To really provide a 'knowledge infrastructure' the company is developing hypertext links between the e-books and online encyclopedias/dictionaries, as well as hypertext links between bibliographic citations in all the articles in their database products, i.e. e-books, full-text journals and dissertations.
Wanfang Data Co. also offers a fulltext journal database but its emphasis is on science and technology. As an outpost of the Chinese Scientific Information Center under the Ministry of Science & Technology, it has the advantage of obtaining publications through the Center very easily and cost effectively. These publications include dissertations, conference proceedings and journals. Apart from these resources it also offers databases on business information, patents, law and legislation, etc. The company only began marketing its information and database products to overseas libraries in October 2003, but actually is already well established in China, having first produced a web database of 200 science & tech journals in 1998.
The third major e-journal database is Weipu Journal Co (http://www.tydata.com). Established by the Chongqing Scientific Information Center its focus is also on science and technology. First started in 1989, its database was available on diskettes, then CD-ROMs and finally online. It offers full-text to 8,000 science and technology journals from back in 1989, making it the most complete database in this area. However, it received a heavy blow last April when it lost a lawsuit against a number of journal publishers for digitizing their content for inclusion in its database without obtaining prior copyright clearance. This shows that when it comes to e-publishing in China there are still cases when intellectual property has not been fully respected.
There are other e-publishing activities by other parties, such as libraries and the government. As part of their digital library projects, bigger libraries are very active in digitizing their resources or creating new resources. The National Library of China, for instance, is developing online indexes to current Chinese yearbooks as well as Chinese rare books down to article level. The Quanguo xinxi ziyuan gongjian gongxiang gongcheng, or National Information Resources Construction and Sharing Project, is a major effort in e-publishing overseen by the Ministry of Culture and created by the China Digital Library Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the National Library of China. The Project has created online resources, including text and multimedia, on various aspects of Chinese history and culture and accessible via the project's website or by satellite download.
e-publishing has already been taken up by the government. On Jan. 22, 1999 more than 40 government ministries and departments kick started the "e-government project". As of May 20, 1999 more than 720 ministries and departments have established their own web sites. Compared to the situation several years ago, now a lot of government bodies have their own web sites and publish annual reports and legislations on their web sites. This is happening even down to the provincial and city levels.
To conclude, e-publishing has certainly started to change the publishing landscape in China. Not only are more and more CD-ROMs being produced, and mostly not as accompanying materials to printed publications but as new publications in their own right, or as new carriers for Chinese classics. Online products like e-books and fulltext journal databases are mostly still based on printed publications, but the mass readership in China would provide a huge market and a bright prospect for these products. As more and more people go online, or have access to PCs in places of work or study, the future of e-publishing is looking bright.
References
The publishing industry in China. New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, 2003.
Zhongguo chu ban nian jian, 1994-2003
