The annual Beijing Book Fair opened at the China International Exhibition Center on Sunday.

The four-day event hosts more than 762 publishing organizations, showcasing more than 200,000 new books, periodicals, electronic publications and audio-video products. More than 1,000 libraries nationwide and 100 Chinese-language bookstores from Singapore, Japan, Australia, Thailand, the Republic of Korea and Malaysia will visit and place orders for books.

Organized by the Books and Periodicals Distribution Association of China and the Publishers Association of China, the 25th fair shows the event's growth into a major platform for the book trade since its inception in 1987.

One highlight of this year's fair, says Huang Guorong, deputy secretary-general of Publishers Association of China, is that private publishing organizations "have surfaced from underground".

Private publishing organizations joined the fair four years ago on a small scale. They were not allowed to set up exhibition booths and could only appear as affiliates of State-owned publishing houses.

This year, 122 private publishing organizations are participating, and 324 booths have been reserved for them.

Other highlights include high-level forums on such topics as the restructuring of the publishing industry and international trends in digital publishing. The Eighth Mao Dun Literature Prize winners Zhang Wei and Liu Xinglong will engage in a conversation about the status quo of short stories and novella creation.

Monica Transtromer, wife of the 2011 Nobel literature laureate Thomas Transtromer, will be present on his behalf to see the launch of the Complete Works of Transtromer, the most comprehensive Chinese translation of the Swedish poet's work.

The closure of O2SUN, a chain bookstore with 31 outlets, in late October, has drawn attention to the plight of private bookstores, more than 10,000 of which have gone bankrupt nationwide since 2007. Bookstore owners and industry professionals will gather for a seminar and a workshop on feasible business innovations of private bookstores.

According to Liu Binjie, director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, the total output of the country's publishing industry was 1.5 trillion yuan ($237.42 billion) in 2011, compared with 1.3 trillion yuan in 2010.