Dear Editor,
After reading the article "A Reader's Paradise, a Publisher's Inferno" in the May edition of Sinorama, I have to say that my own impressions of the publishing industry, having worked in it for many years, are somewhat different. For example, Nanfang Shuo may well believe that there has been no fall in the number of people reading books but it seems to me that he is out of touch, perhaps unaware that lovers of books such as himself are already a rarity.
There have been recent reports in the newspapers indicating that with the recent spread of SARS many readers are too scared to visit their local bookstores. As a result, book sales for April 2003 are already 20% down on sales for the same period last year. Although it has been suggested that with so many people quarantined at home the best way to spend the time is to read, it is becoming increasingly clear that the main competitor publishers face is not other publishers but television. Almost the first thing anyone does at home is look for the remote control and once the television is turned it takes charge of the whole room.
Even with more free time at home, the number of people reading books will not increase because we are simply not a society of readers. About a decade ago Gao Xingjian wrote the novel Soul Mountain, but in the ten years after it was published only 2,000 copies were sold. Only after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the publishers re-released the book did sales improve.
Other than the decline in the number of readers, another problem facing the publishing industry in Taiwan, as your magazine has observed, is that too many books are being released, as many as 40,000 new titles a year. In point of fact, the problem of excess product is not exclusive to the publishing industry, as I would say that many local industries are currently overproducing. The result of this kind of competition in such a small market is that everyone loses out-no wonder the number of unsold books being returned to publishers continues to increase.
Indeed, although many books are published, good books remain few and far between, with photo albums or comic books current favorites. As a result, there has been a rush to the bottom of the barrel as far as quality is concerned. Of course some people will argue that in an era of increasing diversity the publication of such books is perfectly normal. But could it be, as I suspect, that this kind of shallow diversification is more likely to be indicative of a loss of professionalism?
