From Woodblocks to the Internet

The thirteen essays in this volume narrate and analyze the reciprocal influences of technological, intellectual, and
sociopolitical changes on the structure of modern China's book (and print) trade; more specifically, they treat the rise of new genres of print, changes in writing practices, the dissemination of ideas and texts (both paper and electronic), the organization of knowledge, and the relationship between the state and print culture. The essays range chronologically from the late eighteenth century to the present, an over two-century transition period that allows authors to draw comparisons between the largely woodblock print culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the mechanized publishing of the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; and the global internet culture of today.

Cynthia J. Brokaw, Ph.D. (1984), Harvard University, is Professor of History at Brown University. A specialist in Chinese book history, she has published, most recently, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (2007).

Christopher A. Reed, Ph.D. (1996), University of California at Berkeley, is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. In 2004, he published the ICAS Humanities Book Prize-winning Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937.

"This collection of essays, comprehensive in scope and illuminating in many aspects, has enriched our understanding of the history on Chinese print culture in the modern period."
Kai-Wing Chow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72 Number 1 (Feb, 2013)