All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French

The 1930s Book Pirates of Shanghai

Posted: May 18th, 2015 | No Comments »

You don’t hear as much about book pirates and the vast number of pirated books available in China as you used to, though I assume street carts selling pirated books are still to be found. DVDs, software, video games are all recent inventions but books have been around a long time and have always been pirated in China…

index

This report, from 1939, found that pirated American books were selling for about a quarter to one seventh of the US price in Peking’s markets and that the collapse in the Chinese dollar compared to the American was spurring the trade. Apparently, unlike today, China’s book pirates faced little sanction as the government had not signed any international agreements on copyright. So confident were they that they advertised annual subscriptions to a range of pirated materials for the voracious reader. And, just as with Harry Potter etc today, pirated copies of new books were available just weeks after their US publication.

1431595722_tmp_Harrisburg_Sunday_Courier_Sun__Dec_17__1939__1_



Leave a Reply