work. In 1969 some decentralization in publishing took
place with the opening of branch offices of the larger houses in a few
of the more heavily populated districts. Although this program was
ostensibly initiated for the purpose of securing "a broader scope of
reader preference" in the number and type of books to be published,
press reports published in late 1971 indicated very little popular
support for this experiment.

Of the 9,399 titles published in 1969, the greatest numbers were in the
fields of technology, industry, agriculture, and medicine. Also included
in this group were books, treatises, studies, and reports in the general
economic field as well as translations from foreign sources. This
category of titles, although representing about 33 percent of those
published, had an average circulation of only about 3,500 copies per
title--well below the overall average of approximately 9,000.

The second largest group of published titles was in the field of social
sciences and represented approximately 22 percent of the total. This
classification included all books dealing with political science and
socioeconomic theory as well as all textbooks and materials used in the
educational system. A particularly large segment of books in this area
were documents and manuals used for party training, Marxist-Leninist
classics, and party-directed studies and monographs dealing with the
historical, philosophical, or sociological development of the communist
movement.

The material published in the fields of art, games, sports, and music
dominated the third largest group and ranged from children's
entertainment to musical scores. The fourth largest group, representing
about 15 percent of the national publishing effort, related to general
literature. This field covered novels, essays, short stories, and poetry
written by recognized authors as well as by less well established modern
writers, both domestic and foreign. The books selected from foreign
sources were carefully scrutinized, and very few were published that
dealt with contemporary Western subjects. Also banned, as a matter of
general principle, was all material that (in the judgment of chief
editors) "did not contribute actively to the socialist education of the
new man" within the communist society.

Distribution and Foreign Exchange

The distribution and sale of books, both domestic and foreign, are
vested in the Book Central, a state-owned organization that is