Pulp Pirate

Today I discovered that the convenience store in our block had began selling paperback books. Quite excellent! Though there's only some 200 titles, the selection is reasonable and goes from fiction and business to history and biographies. In English.

The store had a renovation recently and almost doubled its size. It's still small, but not claustrophobically so. I guess that's when they put up the book shelves, though I must have missed it at least two or three times. They also carry a fair selection of magazines, but so far I haven't stopped for long enough to check if any of them are in English.

Anyway. The books being sold are the same kinds of paperbacks that you can find in the down town nearby the food joints favoured by foreigners of the more settled-down type. There the books are sold on the street corner from a suitcase or from the back of a trike by a local book pirate. In principle they're the same books you can get from any decent book shop, and the airports, but compared to those places the street prices are 80-90% less.



The full-colour covers look perfect with the embossed titles and all. The books have a transparent plastic wrap. The paper used in the pages is cheap but quite all-right. But the insides are copies of the original book's pages. You can tell by looking the print quality - except you don't, thanks the wrapping. The pages are well bound but the text looks as if photocopied, or in fact printed with a book printer well past its heydays in some warehouse in the countryside... or there where the countryside of Shanghai used to be but what now is a sea of joint-ventures and light industry.

On the plus side of things they don't cost much at all. Seems the price goes by thickness. Those of 1 cm or less cost 10 Yuan (roughly 1 Euro), 1 - 2 cm thick ones are 20 Yuan, 2 - 3 cm are 30 Yuan, and so on. The shop's cash register doesn't understand the books' bar-codes, so the book sales are recorded separately on a note pad. With a pen. Maybe they all have the same bar-code. Didn't check.

It is quite interesting to find pirated pulp being sold in a reasonably up-scale convenience store. On the other hand, there used to be similar rips of English computer manuals for sale right in the middle of the bookworm's life line; the Fuzhou Road. But those helpful back-room businesses disappeared years ago. The trike traders have been always around, unless it rains. But now they're between the meats and ice cream? That's new.