The domestic book publishing industry has made great strides forward in working together with their foreign counterparts.
According to the 2013 CBI annual meeting in Guangzhou on April 10, by the end of last year, CBI inked 1,095 agreements with 486 publishing organizations from 61 countries outside China. This funded overseas publishing of 2,201 Chinese titles in 38 languages.
CBI's China Masterwork International was launched in 2009. By 2012, CMI had signed 67 agreements with 43 publishers from 17 countries. This covered translation and promotion of 763 titles into 10 foreign languages.
The two projects have contributed to balancing Chinese book copyright trade with foreign countries.
In 2003, China brought in about 15 books from abroad, while selling one. In 2012 the ratio was more like 1.9 to one.
Among the most popular Chinese books in the international market, Beijing Normal University professor Yu Dan's Confucius from the Heart - an interpretation of Confucian wisdom - sold 340,000 copies in 21 languages. In France, it sold 100,000 copies and remained on the best-selling list for 14 weeks.
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