Empire of Texts
Empire of Texts
Book Production, Book Distribution, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China
Brokaw draws upon her field research in China to give an exceptionally rich account of the production practices in ordinary book publishing outfits in market towns and villages in key production sites of south China in late imperial times. She pays particular attention to publishing technology, noting that printing with moveable type, which had been tried in China, was ‘not cost effective’ and that woodblock printing had ‘certain economic advantages over European-style letter-press printing’, since it did not require investment in expensive machinery or the need to estimate in advance the number of copies of a text that would be bought.
Keywords: Europe, Asia, Eurasia, Book history, Book culture, Book Printing, Technology, Publishing, Book distribution, Book consumption
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