How the 117-Year-Old Commercial Press Is Facing Amazon and the E-Book Era

Behind 639 e-book editions of the Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics lie twelve years of digital publishing at the Commercial Press.

A boulder at the entrance of the Commercial Press bears the words "Modern Chinese publishing began here." No phrase better sums up the press's standing in Chinese publishing. Founded in 1897 and based at 36 Wangfujing Street in Beijing, it is China's oldest commercial publisher, and in its 117 years it has come close to embodying the history of modern Chinese publishing. It racked up a long list of firsts: the first commercial publishing house, the first to print from paper stereotype molds, and, from 1902 on, a pioneer in introducing Western scholarship to China.

The Xinhua Dictionary, which nearly every Chinese reader knows, is also a Commercial Press book. By 2013 it had sold 500 million copies. A rough calculation puts the paper consumed at about 125,000 metric tons.

In 1997, a century after the Commercial Press was founded, Amazon went public in New York. Among the many ambitions of this company that sells everything was to relieve paper of the work it has done for human civilization. It launched the Kindle, the most popular e-reader, and Kindle e-books now account for 19.5% of the entire US book market, print and digital combined.

With the book market in upheaval and e-books on the rise, the Commercial Press wants to become the birthplace of "modern publishing" once again.

Sun Shuxue, director of the Commercial Press's Digital Publishing Center, carries six mobile devices: three phones on different operating systems and three tablets of different sizes and specs. He often tests the press's "Chinese for Foreigners" app on his iPhone, and checks how the Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics look on Android phones and tablets. Every one of his devices has a dozen or more reading apps installed.

Sun has worked on digital publishing since the day he joined the press. "We built a lot of databases for our reference books," he said. "I started building a corpus in 2002 and worked on it for more than ten years." Before computer corpora, a dictionary's compilers had to decide for themselves which entries to include, sometimes writing them out one by one on paper index cards. The digital corpus changed dictionary editing first.

In 2009, Sun became director of the newly created Digital Publishing Center.

"The Commercial Press set up the Digital Publishing Center at the end of 2008," Li Ping, the deputy editor-in-chief who oversees digital publishing, told QDaily. "From the day the center was founded, we decided to make digital publishing part of the press's overall strategy. In 2010 we set out an explicit timetable and roadmap for it."

November 4, 2014 may have been the most important day in recent years, both for the Commercial Press and for Sun personally. That day the press signed a strategic agreement with Amazon to release print and e-book editions simultaneously; from now on, its books will go on sale in both formats at once. On top of that, all 639 volumes of the Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics had been converted to e-books and were going on sale in batches.

Apart from the Xinhua Dictionary, which everyone has used, this series, with its colored back covers and white front covers, may be the press's best-known set of books among general readers. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The Prince, and the philosophical works of Aristotle and Hegel all reached China first through the Commercial Press. The press began translating scholarly works in the 1950s, and the series' first selection came out in 1981, including Utopia and Metaphysics. It covers six fields: politics and law, economics, philosophy, history, geography, and language. For many readers, it was the only systematic social-science series they could buy before China's reform and opening up.

Ma Yixin, the project's technical lead, was born in 1981, the same year the series began. Converting all 639 volumes took the Digital Publishing Center a full year.

At a Kindle e-book technology summit Amazon hosted on October 23, Ma shared his technical experience with others in the publishing trade. For QDaily, he spent two hours and 48 slides explaining how the press makes its e-books.

Digital publishing poses technical problems publishers have never faced before. A printed book is typeset once; an e-book has to reflow automatically to fit screens of any size. Making one is closer to web design than to print production. It may look like simply moving text from paper to screen, but the process in between is far more complicated than most readers imagine.

To handle more than 600 specialist titles, Ma and his team created their own style standard, CPDocBook, which covers 84 text styles, including chapter headings, body text, and notes. More impressive still, they wrote software that converts Founder typesetting files directly into XML, the data format needed to build the final e-book. Founder is the most widely used typesetting system in China, but because it is a closed system, converting its files usually takes two to three times as long. Probably no more than two publishers in China have solved this problem.

They also solved problems that never come up when digitizing ordinary bestsellers. The Collected Works of Albert Einstein contains nearly 5,000 mathematical formulas. Ma had two options: capture each formula as an image, or render it so that readers could search and copy it on screen. Both meant a great deal of manual work. Ma chose the second, better option and entered the formulas one at a time in MathML, a markup language. It is currently the best way to handle formulas in e-books, but it requires staff who can code, and it takes a long time.

Besides formulas, the series contains text in less common languages such as Greek and Latin. To add special characters, the team designed a complete workflow, from flagging a character to inserting it, so that every one displays correctly.

"When I was doing the Einstein volumes, my colleagues joked: why go to all that trouble over this book?" Ma told QDaily. "But for some people, this book might shape their whole lives. It's worth doing."

Technically, the Commercial Press has gone further than most Chinese publishers. What is rarer is how much it cares about quality. A hard problem like formulas could have been handled with rougher images, but Ma was willing to spend more time and solve, once and for all, the problem of displaying them on whatever screens come next. The result also looks better.

The press's e-book production is meticulous, with little regard for the cost in labor or materials. Sun says cost is not the main consideration for this series; social impact is. Behind this careful work stands a sizable team. Most publishers set up an e-book department alongside their print operations that does nothing but convert finished print books into digital editions. The Digital Publishing Center under Sun, by contrast, is almost a small publishing house of its own, handling everything from choosing titles to production and marketing. Besides seven digital editors, it has more than thirty staff who belong to a subsidiary, Shangyihua Information Technology Co., Ltd.

A digital department of more than forty people is very rare in Chinese publishing. CITIC Press, better known for its digital publishing, has only twenty-odd. The difference comes from the center's job: besides publishing e-books, its main business is building reference-book databases.

Few outsiders know that reference books were where the Commercial Press's digital transition really began. "We did a lot of technical groundwork," Sun said. "We didn't wake up one morning and decide to go print-and-digital." Before consumers saw the press's e-books appear in the Kindle store seemingly overnight, its technical transformation had been going on quietly for 12 years.

The change came in the year Yu Dianli took over as the press's general manager. In 2009, the Digital Publishing Center drew editors with relevant experience straight from the Chinese-language publishing division and the audiovisual and information center, forming a seven-person digital editing team. Ma, who handles the technology, joined the new department because the work interested him.

At first, the press's digital work focused almost entirely on reference books, with clear results: more than a hundred reference titles have now been fully structured and turned into databases. "At the very beginning, our strategy was to make basically only B2B database products, from reference books," Li said. "But digital trends moved very fast. In less than a year we adjusted the strategy. If we hadn't, we would have fallen behind."

While the Commercial Press was setting concrete goals for its digital transition, Amazon's Kindle team arrived in China. Jiang Feng, director of digital content for Kindle, had worked in publishing since 1990 and joined Amazon in December 2010 to prepare its entry into China. He and his team began by running "101 courses" for Chinese publishers, giving more than two hundred talks to spread the idea of e-books.

The first collaboration between the press and Amazon began soon after. "I first came across the Commercial Press at the Asia Digital Publishing Forum on November 9, 2010," Jiang told QDaily. "At the time they worked mainly on corpora and databases. We got in touch because we were looking for a Chinese dictionary for Amazon. We were very lucky that they had built an excellent database for the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. We later made it the Kindle's built-in Chinese dictionary. Without that database to start from, building the dictionary from scratch would have been unthinkable."

From there, the Commercial Press moved naturally into e-book publishing with Amazon, and Yu Dianli, then new as general manager, put forward the idea of "reengineering the publishing process."

"When we were promoting the Kindle and the idea of e-books in China, it was always hard to explain how to go digital and how to sell e-books," Jiang recalled. "On May 3, 2011, when we were already in talks with the Commercial Press, Yu Dianli gave a talk on digital publishing at the National Copyright Seminar and raised two concepts that suddenly made everything clear to us."

Yu has returned to these ideas again and again in later interviews and articles. In his view, "digital publishing" is simply the natural next step in how things are made: in the digital age, all production should be done digitally.

In a recent interview with China Press and Publishing Journal, he laid out the argument in detail:

"Until now, Chinese publishing has gone digital in one of two ways. Either digital publishing was split off from traditional publishing, setting the two against each other from the start, or, inside traditional publishing houses, digital publishing became an appendage of the printed book. The whole book market is still at the stage of 'turning print books into e-books.' Books are not prepared for digital publication from the outset; only after a publisher has released a print book and decides it would also suit digital platforms does it set about converting it into an electronic edition.

Without production processes and methods built for developing digital products, all-media publishing will stay stuck in the unhappy position of making print products first and digital products as an afterthought. Digital products usually need structured data, but the typesetting methods and publishing processes of traditional print books produce data that cannot be structured. If we have only a production process for print, our digital products will be held back at every turn, trapped in an endless cycle of producing and converting, producing again and converting again, forever processing 'legacy data.' So at the production stage, simultaneous print and digital publication means reengineering the production process and changing the way we produce."

The digitization of the Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics bore this out. To produce the 639 e-books, the Digital Publishing Center had to sort through nearly every historical file for the series and write the technical standards and workflow for e-book production from scratch.

Under the press's coming print-and-digital program, a new enterprise resource planning system should simplify these laborious steps. Just as laser phototypesetting replaced hot-metal type, digitization may turn out to be just another way of making books.

The Commercial Press hopes to remain the "birthplace of modern publishing" in the digital age.

But in digital publishing, the press has completed only the first step: producing the content. The new "modern publishing" still needs a complete industry chain and, in the end, products that make money.

The press spends too little on marketing and on earning revenue. E-book sales depend on online promotion, yet its two or three digital sales staff do little more than work with the various retail channels. You will hardly find the Commercial Press promoting its e-books at all. Many people have no idea that the Chinese Translations of World Academic Classics are already in the Kindle store.

As a result, the series is hard to find anywhere on the Kindle bestseller lists.

Without even basic marketing, there is no talk of e-book pricing strategy, app promotion, reader surveys, or sales-data analysis, all of which are close to common sense in selling digital content today.

More broadly, the Commercial Press's problem is the whole industry's problem. Publishers still have no clear model for running an e-book business. Every house is eagerly embracing "digitization," but for all the money that the Commercial Press, CITIC Press, and others pour in year after year, no one can say with any confidence how big the e-book market is, or when they will start making money from it.

For these reasons, digital publishing is still a long way from a complete ecosystem. Amazon currently converts and builds e-books for publishers at a rate of 1,200 titles a month, but it struggles to keep up when large jobs come in all at once. Publishers like the Commercial Press have started building their own technical teams to do the work in-house, but a complete ecosystem will have to wait for third-party production companies to emerge and mature at scale. Only then will digital publishing become a more natural, lower-cost way to make books.

As the Kindle China store marks its second anniversary, Amazon does not shy away from these problems, but it remains very optimistic. As Amazon sees it, the hardest days for e-books may be over. Jiang no longer faces the publishing staff of 2010, eager about digital publishing but with no idea where to begin. The new Kindle Voyage sold out on pre-order before its December 10 launch in China, and Amazon's store now carries 170,000 titles. Two years ago it had 24,000.

Sun Ziwei, senior manager for digital content and one of the earliest members of Amazon's Kindle team, took part in the first technical training sessions for publishers. "In another two to three years, e-books should grow fairly quickly," he said. "At the very least, every publisher will have an independent digital department that works alongside print and puts digital publishing first."

At the November 4 signing ceremony with the Commercial Press, Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's senior vice president in charge of Kindle worldwide, visited the press and shared what Amazon had learned. In the US, it took four years for Amazon's e-book sales to overtake its print sales; in the UK, it took two and a half. If China takes five years, its tipping point is three years away.

Li Ping, the deputy editor-in-chief, told reporters: "E-book profits are still far behind those of print books and reference books. We don't expect much profit from them."

Next to the Commercial Press's 100 million yuan in profit, e-book sales of under 1 million yuan a year and a database business in the tens of millions are tiny. To protect its revenue and profit, the press will have to keep pushing its traditional reference and academic publishing. Each year its hundred-plus editors put out nearly a thousand titles; seven digital editors and an e-book program barely register by comparison.

The boulder at the entrance carries one more line: "Promote education, enlighten the people," the founding mission set out by Zhang Yuanji, a leading scholar of the late Qing dynasty. The press was born as the reform movement was gathering force, and from the start it carried a duty to build Chinese publishing. That kind of duty often means ignoring cost: behind the first commercial publisher, the first paper-mold stereotype printing, and the first Chinese typewriter stood resources mobilized on a national scale.

This time, the press has plenty of money for e-books, thanks in part to government purchasing. According to a report by China Publishing Group, the Xinhua Dictionary was added to the government procurement list in 2013, to be given free to every rural student in the nine years of compulsory education. That brought the press orders for 100 million copies and 2 billion yuan in sales.

Those 2 billion yuan have bought its digital transition a little time.

Forging Ahead: A Century of Business at the Commercial Press, published in 2007, opens with this line: "Whatever the setbacks, whenever and wherever, the Commercial Press has held to its ideals and given readers books worth opening, carrying it across three centuries through a hundred years of upheaval."

Every morning at 10:30, many of the press's staff walk to the small auditorium at 36 Wangfujing and practice tai chi together. Sun Shuxue says this is part of the company's culture. In that small hall, to the music of the 24-form routine, it can seem as if 117 years have not passed at all.

The press's twelve-year digital transition mixes many things: 117 years of history, technological change, state ownership, a Xinhua Dictionary that makes money with no effort, anxiety about the digital tide, the mission of "promoting education and enlightening the people," the slow movements of tai chi, and Amazon pushing from behind.

It hopes to find its place in its third century.