A Reader's Paradise, a Publisher's Inferno

This article was written by Teng Sue-feng, translated by Phil Newell, and published by The Sinorama Magazine in May 2003.

Taiwan has been described as "a reader's paradise, a publisher's inferno". Over the last 20 years, as the economy has grown, the publishing industry has also experienced rapid expansion, with the number of publishers increasing from the hundreds to the thousands. Taiwan, with a population of only 23 million, comes out with more than 40,000 new titles a year, which puts the island second in the world in new titles per capita. Even given the economic downturn of the last couple of years, bestsellers have still been moving out of bookstores by the hundreds of thousands of copies, and there are chain bookstores everywhere. If reading is an indicator of a society's level of culture, what do these statistics, which suggest great vitality, really tell us?