Juan Palomo

Hay que ver los chinos como son.

Según cuenta Wei Bin, editor de Writers’ Publishing House, en este artículo del NYTimes en 2001 entre el 30% y el 40% de los libros publicados en China eran piratas.

Al parecer es toda una industria. Agradecida, eso sí:

An Boshun, the editor of one of the best-selling works of Chinese fiction in recent years, “Wolf Totem” (whose author has maintained anonymity), said there were at least 15 million fake copies of that novel in circulation here, compared with 2 million legal ones.

“I once even got a call from someone who said that he represented two pirate-book businessmen and they wanted him to say thanks to me for my work,” Mr. An said. “They wanted me to know that ‘Wolf Totem’ had brought many job opportunities to country folks working in printing shops in Hebei and Shandong Provinces.”

Harry Potter es obviamente uno de los más copiados, pero es que, claro, J.K. es muy lenta escribiendo:

One such writer is a manager at a Shanghai textile factory named Li Jingsheng. “I bought Harry Potter 1 through 6 for my son a couple of years ago, and when he finished reading them, he kept asking me to tell him what happens next,” he explained. “We couldn’t wait, so I began making up my own story and in May last year, I typed it up on my computer. I had to get up early and go to bed late to write this novel, usually spending one hour, from 6 to 7 in the morning and 10 to 11 in the evening to write it.”

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.