Exporting China’s Scholarly Books: Current Conditions for Chinese Publishers

The purpose of this article is twofold: a) to analyse the current situation of Chinese academic book exports from a publisher’s perspective, including models, channels, motivation, and performance; b) to identify the challenges that Chinese scholarly publishers are facing and explain their causes. In all, fifteen publishers from state presses, local presses, and university presses were interviewed. Desk research supplemented the interview data. We found that co-publishing, copyright transfer, and physical book export are the main models and that publishers prefer co-publishing and copyright transfer to exporting actual books. Book fairs and copyright agents are still important channels for negotiating export deals. Applying for funding programs and achieving evaluative benchmarks are the principal motivators for publishers. Surprisingly, over half the publishers interviewed do not profit much from exportation. Nevertheless, supervising departments and chief managers still attach much importance to it. At present, Chinese scholarly publishers are confronted with the challenges of a quality gap, state subsidy substituting for a real market, and information asymmetry. Unreasonable systems of academic evaluation and quality control, state-owned property rights, limited qualified manpower, and rare cooperation are key causes of these challenges.