第一章对唐宋以来士人与商业出版之间的关系进行历史回顾，为本书的研究提供历史纵深。第二章考察晚明士人参与商业出版活动的历史背景和社会动因。第三章到第六章将参与商业出版活动的士人按照身份和角色划分为若干类型，结合个案研究和丰富的实例，对晚明士人参与商业出版活动的方式、过程加以深入探讨。第七章探讨了晚明士人参与商业出版活动的意义。

In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, D. F. McKenzie shows how the material form of texts crucially determines their meanings. He unifies the principal interests of both critical theory and textual scholarship to demonstrate that, as all works of lasting value are reproduced, re-edited and re-read, they take on different forms and meanings. By witnessing the new needs of their new readers these new forms constitute vital evidence for any history of reading. McKenzie shows this is true of all forms of recorded information, including sound, graphics, films, representations of landscape and the new electronic media. The bibliographical skills first developed for manuscripts and books can, he shows, be applied to a wide range of cultural documents. This book, which incorporates McKenzie's classic work on orality and literacy in early New Zealand, offers a unifying concept of texts that seeks to acknowledge their variety and the complexity of their relationships.

This book is a path-breaking study of print culture in early modern China. It argues that printing with both woodblocks and movable type exerted a profound influence on Chinese society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book examines the rise and impact of print culture from both economic and cultural perspectives.
In economic terms, the central issues were the price of books and the costs of book production. Chow argues that contrary to accepted views, inexpensive books were widely available to a growing literate population. An analysis of the economic and operating advantages of woodblock printing explains why it remained the dominant technology even as the use of movable type was expanding.
The cultural focus shows the impact of commercial publishing on the production of literary culture, particularly on the civil service examination. The expansion of the book market produced publicity for literary professionals whose authority came to challenge the authority of the official examiners.

From the 11th through the 17th centuries, the publishers of Jianyang in Fujian province played a conspicuous role in the Chinese book trade. Unlike the products of government and educational presses, their publications were destined for the retail book market. These publishers survived by responding to consumer demands for dictionaries, histories, geographies, medical texts, encyclopaedias, primers, how-to books, novels and anthologies. Their publications reflect the varied needs of the full range of readers in late imperial China and allow us to study the reading habits, tastes and literacy of different social groups. The publishers of Jianyang were also businessmen, and their efforts to produce books efficiently, meet the demands of the market, and distribute their publications provide a window on commerce and industry and the growth of regional and national markets. The broad cultural, historical and geographical scope of the Jianyang book trade makes it an ideal subject for the study of publishing in China. Based on an extensive study of Jianyang imprints, geneaologies of the leading families of printers, local histories, documents and annotated catalogues and bibliographies, Lucille Chia has written not only a history of commercial printing but also a wide-ranging study of the culture of the book in traditional China.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, what methods were used to monitor and control the increasing number of texts--from the early handwritten books to the later, printed volumes--that were being put into circulation? In "The Order of Books, Chartier examines the different systems required to regulate the world of writing through the centuries, from the registration of titles to the classification of works. The modern world has, he argues, directly inherited the products of this labor: the basic principle of referring to texts, the dream of a universal library, real or imaginary, containing all the works ever written, and the emergence of a new definition of the book leading to some of the innovations that transformed the relationship of the reader to the text. "The Order of Books will be welcomed by students and researchers of cultural history, and the history of reading in particular.