The number of new books published last year was the lowest in 20 years, as publishers were wary of taking risks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a National Central Library (NCL) report released on Thursday showed.
Publishers released 35,041 new titles, including e-books, last year, which was a 4.81 percent decline from the previous year, the report on the nation’s publication trends showed.
Book sales declined 2.79 percent, or NT$440 million (US$15.42 million), to NT$19.04 billion, the library said, citing Ministry of the Interior data.
The figures suggest a general decline in the publishing industry from production to distribution, the library said.
That major publishers have been conservative in releasing new titles in the wake of the pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on the industry, National Central Library Director-General Tseng Shu-hsien (曾淑賢) said.
Most of the country’s 4,649 publishing houses are small and about one in 10 published more than 10 books, she said, adding that 45 released 45 books each, while one published more than 1,000 titles.
The pandemic has also led to changes in reading habits, she said.
There were 497 fewer titles released in the travel literature category, at 109 books, marking a 70.86 percent decline, while business management and art titles fell 20.04 percent and 10.66 percent respectively, she said.
A few genres saw growth in titles published, such as motivational books, of which 1,601 titles were released last year, up by 240, or an increase of 17.63 percent.
Most new books were in history and geography with 4,177 titles released, making up 11.92 percent of all new books, followed by 3,937 children’s books at 11.24 percent; 3,500 sociology books, 9.99 percent; 3,289 novels, 9.39 percent; and 2,821 comic books, 8.05 percent.
Twenty-seven percent of new books were translated from a foreign language, with more than half of the titles originally released in Japanese, while books translated from Korean were also on the rise, Tseng said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS