New Report #3

Lara Farrar. For many Chinese, literary dreams go online 2/15/09. http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/02/15/china.publishing/index.html?eref=rss_tech

In 2001, Murong Xuecun was working as a sales manger at a car company in China when he started posting his first online novel. Today the Xuecun is one of the most famous authors in China. His first work, "Leave Me Alone: A novel of Chengdu," has been read by millions of Chinese and adapted for film and television and translated into German, French and English. Many others have been able to have success similar to Xuecun by publishing their own literary work online. The websites for internet novels creates revenues through online advertising and by charging readers small amounts to access popular stories. But the revolutionary movement has a greater impact besides the internet world. The online novels have in many cases been adapted to games, movies, hardcopies of books, and television. Another advantage of the online novel tract is that the censorship of the online works is less restrictive, allowing writers to be more open in what they write. Despite the fact that the Chinese publishing industry has generally become more liberal in the past few years when online novels are published in hardcopy the stories are edited by censors.
The fact that the average person who has literary dreams has more opportunities to get their work out there is often a good thing but I fear that many my self included hate reading on a computer. This is especially true for me when I’m reading for long time period, but reading for pleasure would be different because I would not have to take notes on what I’m reading. I found it interesting that the online publishers were more lenient on the censorship that the hard copy publishers.