From the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. Unlike the products of government and educational presses, their publications were destined for the retail book market. These publishers survived by responding to consumer demands for dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopedias, primers, how-to books, novels, and anthologies. Their publications reflect the varied needs of the full range of readers in late imperial China and allow us to study the reading habits, tastes, and literacy of different social groups. The publishers of Jianyang were also businessmen, and their efforts to produce books efficiently, meet the demands of the market, and distribute their publications provide a window on commerce and industry and the growth of regional and national markets. The broad cultural, historical, and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, genealogies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents, and annotated catalogs and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

Print, Profit, and Perception examines the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges occurring in China and Taiwan from the first Sino-Japanese War to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing examples from various genres, this interdisciplinary volume presents nine empirically grounded case studies on the growth in the production, dissemination and consumption of texts, which lay behind a dramatic expansion of knowledge. The chapters collectively address the co-existence of globalization and localization processes in the period. By taking into account intra-Asian cultural encounters and tracing the multiple competing forces encountered by many, this book offers a fresh and compelling take on how individuals and social groups participated in transnational conceptual flows. Contributors include: Paul Bailey, Che-chia Chang, Elizabeth Emrich, Tze-ki Hon, Max K.W. Huang, Mei-e Huang, Mike Shi-chi Lan, Pei-yin Lin, and Weipin Tsai.

Business Transformation - A New Path To Profit for the Printing Industry

Excerpt from How to Make Money in the Printing Business: A Book for Master Printers Who Realize That There Is a Practical Side to the Art, and Who Desire to Know the Surest Methods of Making Profits There are in existence about two thousand different books pertaining to printing and typography, and perhaps as many more that are partly devoted to these subjects. Of this large number, only a bare half dozen treat of the business management of a printing office, and its successful operation for the purpose of yielding that profit for which men do business. In the half dozen there is not a total of a hundred pages directed toward the theme of the present work. It seems to me that this is sufficient excuse for bringing this book before the printing trade. For years the cry has gone up from the followers of Guttenberg that there is no money in the printing business, that competition takes all the margin out of the work, and that the cost for renewal of plants has eaten up the profits. Personally, I have found that the printing business yielded satisfactory profits, as much as one could expect in a strictly competitive business, and in every city there are men who have made money in this trade; yet the diversity of opinion as to profitable methods, and the confusion of ideas as to the cost of producing printing, has led me to the conclusion that there is imperative need of an exchange of views for the better education of the trade. There are plenty of books on the history of the art, and a large number exhibiting ornamental printing and the methods of its production, but the practical financial side has been very much neglected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.