Podiobooker
The blog for Podiobooks.com

I don’t think I’d hear a lot of dissent if I said that the internet has forever changed the face of publishing. So with that: The internet has forever changed the face of publishing. There. I said it.

And then I read about how the internet has impacted publishing in China. And now I’m forced to re-think my definition of the word changed.

Half a world away, underpublished novelists and readers alike flocked to the web, breaking down many assumptions we have here in the West. A few things I culled from a CNN.com article on the phenomenon:

• Some of China’s most popular authors are published on the Internet

• Serializing works over there, really really well
• As the State tries to clamps down, authors and readers work right around them and increase mindshare
• Bookstores have entire sections dedicated to print-version of internet novels
• Publishers are trolling the interwebs looking for new talent

That’s nothing short of amazing. Yes, I know that some of those things are happening here in the West. Heck, we’re trying to affect some of those changes. But it seems — at least according to the article — that it’s much more accepted there (today) than here. I’d love some personal accounts of how the internet is redefining publishing in other countries.

This entry was posted by Evo on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Industry news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.