Alastair Clark Reading in the Park
Originally uploaded by clarkalastair

It seems such a shame to me that the authors don’t see a penny of much of the book market in China. It’s the same with dvds and music here. There is a thriving pirate business, and legitimate books, dvds, and music are harder to come by than their pirate counterparts.

Big supermarkets chains, I won’t mention names, but western brands, sell pirate music and dvds at horrendous prices 30-40 yuan [£2-3] for what your getting as they are the same pirate brands that you can get for 5 yuan (40p) /dvd from a street merchant. I feel somewhat against this, especially considering the quality of pirate dvds and music. It makes the people who want to get legitimate materials, such as myself, fear making any purchase of anything other than the pirate stuff, as the quality cannot be assured, whether the money will reach the pockets of the creators, and the item cannot be easily returned as this idea has not taken much hold in Chinese culture yet.

The pirate copies are often of questionable quality, as I’ve seen on the TVs in the supermarket and in bank waiting areas. The books that friends have, have misprints all over the place, and frankly look like scans thrown through some tacky OCR software which hasn’t been checked and edited later.

I think it’s crazy that the supermarkets can call themselves ethical and sell pirated materials. Maybe they’re franchises here, even so I think they should have better checks and balances.

To try to sell TVs using these materials is also crazy, as you can’t show off the quality of the TV if the DVD and dvd player being used is utterly useless. It’s a supermarket, it can afford to import a real dvd from the west, and use a higher end dvd player to demonstrate that, I’m convinced they’d see more TV sales. However, an issue regarding prestige comes into play, as it does in all cultures regarding men and toys, but I think especially so here, where face is all so important. Anyway. Rant over.

I wish that I could find books here where the author would actually be paid. The pirate goods are far too common, and the few places that might be real, the doubt is too great. Choose to live without books, or import from UK, a third option rears its ugly head – Blogs on the internet.