Dear Editor,

After reading the cover stories in your October issue on Chinese-language publishing, I would like to share my thoughts. This is how I see the situation-there are two reasons why the stock in storage with Taiwan's publishers is so huge: they're publishing too many new titles, and they're all getting more and more alike.

Every month the publishing industry foists numerous lookalike books on us. Going about things this way is testing the limits of what consumers can stomach. Repeatedly publishing such homogeneous books, of course the market will end up saturated and large numbers of books will remain unsold and be returned to the publishers. Honestly, from the perspective of the bookstores, is there a need to constantly push a new batch of look-alike books onto the market on a monthly basis? The fact is, most of the new titles packed onto the shelves aren't destined to be bestsellers; though many are worth honorable mentions.

I've noticed a trend: in recent years, a large number of works that have entered the market have been from the mainland-both original Chinese and translated works-and this has become one of the causes of the current rapid expansion of the Taiwanese book market. Moreover, these books aren't limited to the old academic and translated works, they've now grown to include popular literature.

As I recall, your article mentioned a conflict between Taiwanese "popular culture" and mainland "knowledge discourses." Again, I have a different take on this: perhaps there is too substantial a difference between the directions of the two markets in terms of bestseller material. Authors from Taiwan like Jimmy and Wang Wenhua have secured their places in the mainland literature market, and motivational writers like Wu Juo-chuan, Lin Ching-hsuan, and Liu Yung have battled through on the mainland, and their efforts are now beginning to bear fruit. However, what most people don't know is, every month untold numbers of generic literature, motivational books, and even history and business management books are brought into Taiwan from the mainland. Not only are these books generic and over-produced, they're also conveniently lightweight in nature. True, these books may sell far less than the dazzling numbers pulled in by the best-sellers, but look at it another way. In terms of the total amount published, this steady, solid flow of books coming in from the mainland is already making serious incursions into the literary mass market.

Basically, what I'm saying is that in this clash between the publishing industries on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan is dependent on the mainland for both popular and intellectual works. The fact is, very few Taiwanese works make it smoothly into the mainland market, and those few that do successfully break into it are just urban literature and translations of outstanding foreign works. These amount to no more than a drop in the ocean as far as the mainland market is concerned, with its 170-180,000 new titles a year.