http://www.printing-in-china.cn/shownews.asp?id=1840
With publishing hit harder than most fields by the global financial crisis, and not being all that adventurous an industry to begin with, it was inevitable that 2010 would be a year of consolidation and playing it safe. Yes, cookbooks, children's books and business guides did well, and on the fiction front there were plenty of vampires, forensic pathology whodunnits, serial killers and conspiracy thrillers. More editorial work than ever is going into making mass fiction as compatible as possible with what most people expect a genre to entail, and more books are fitting into multi-volume series with protagonists and scenarios that people become familiar with.
Formulaic writing is nothing new. In 1936, mystery writer S.S. Van Dine published an article called "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", among which included: "the reader should have the same opportunity as the detective to solve the crime", "no tricks can be played to mislead the reader unless it is also done to the detective by the criminal", "neither the detective nor one of the official investigators can turn out to be the criminal" and "the villain must be found by logical deduction, not luck, accident, or un-motivated confessions." Another 16 rules circumscribe other feats of imagination, to the point where it seems impossible to write anything original and still adhere to the rules. But even within this framework is room to manoeuvre, and Agatha Christie managed to write dozens of classics without smashing the mystery framework. And as many genre writers will point out, a sonnet is a formula, a pop song is a formula, most television series fit time and thematic constraints and yet at the top end of the quality spectrum there is plenty of imagination, spark and originality.
And 2010 saw lots of edifying and entertaining books published. The difficulty is in finding them, of weeding through the pulp, the how-to and the cookery and finding works with the power to expand the scope of a reader's imagination.
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printing in china | book printing china--60-year history in publishing

A leading international specialist in print culture, Dr Keith Maslen (84), is delighted to receive the ONZM honour.
The honour citation describes Dr Maslen, of Dunedin, as ''New Zealand's pre-eminent bibliographer'' who had made a ''lifetime contribution to the study of books and their history''.
He was also one of the three main editors of the trail-blazing first major history of publishing in New Zealand: Book and Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (1997).
A former long-serving staff member in the University of Otago English department, he remains an honorary fellow who is still active in the department's ''scholarly and social life''.
He has received many fellowships and other awards and is a former president and long-standing council member of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.
Born in Timaru, he later studied at Canterbury University and Oxford University.
His first scholarly publication was ''exactly 60 years ago'', when he had ''sorted out problems'' in first edition printing of a childhood favourite, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
He had since published more than 100 scholarly books and articles, including ''a little biography of the Coull brothers, early Dunedin printers, who lie behind the Whitcoull name'', he said
This appeared in the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a work with articles on every aspect of print culture.
''As if to emphasise that scholars, shut in their own private studies, nevertheless labour in a ghostly company spanning the centuries and the globe, there stands an entry under my own name with the not too subtle warning `1926-','' he said.
From 1961, in order to better to equip himself to study printing and publishing in the hand-press era - from about 1450-1850 and beyond - he ran a printing workshop and museum called the Bibliography Room.
Now renamed the Otakou Press, this still operates at the university library.
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