Human Kinetics has been selling books in China for more than 15 years. Since that time we’ve worked hard to make our content available to the Chinese people.
Five years ago, we reached an agreement with a former HK employee, Enyi Cai, to represent us as our distributor for China under the name KinesWorld. KinesWorld has been successful in building our institutional, journal, and e-book sales. Operating as Human Kinetics China, KinesWorld has sold at least $25,000 in products in each of its five years.
The KinesWorld website, HumanKineticsChina.com, is used as a promotional tool but does not have a shopping cart. As KinesWorld builds inventory of HK products, we will add web sales.
KinesWorld will continue to function as our partner in China. This past November, Enyi and her husband, Weimo Zhu, hosted Rainer and Julie Martens on a two-week tour of China. We all look forward to Rainer and Julie’s photo log of their experiences in China.
Human Kinetics established a relationship with the Science and Education Department of the Chinese Olympic Committee (COC) in 2008. During meetings at our offices in Champaign, HK and the COC made a formal commitment to work together to deliver HK content to coaches and students in China. Since then, the COC has focused its efforts on ensuring that all of HK’s primary sport science products are translated into the Chinese language, and so far they’ve translated more than 50 of our books.
Recent discussions with the COC have turned toward the possibility of creating new products for publication in China. At a meeting in Beijing in August, Jerry Wang, director of the National Sports Training Center of the COC, expressed interest in working with HK on sport training. The developing partnership with the COC holds promise of a pathway toward sustainable sales in China. The COC can offer an official introduction of our content to the thousands of Chinese youth in the sport academies.
Our rights business for the Simplified Chinese (Mandarin) language is steady each year. Since our first Simplified Chinese rights deal in 1996, we have completed 164 translation agreements for products in that language. Beijing Sport University Press and People’s Sports Publishing are our primary rights partners, but we have executed rights partnerships with several publishing companies in China.
We will continue to promote our new titles to our publishing partners for translation rights. We will also continue to pursue possible co-editions and new product concepts with the COC and the China Institute of Sport Science.
In August of this year, we reached an agreement with the China National Publications Import Export Company (CNPIEC) to sell our e-books. CNPIEC is the official government importer of Western books. By the end of 2013, 394 HK e-books will be available on the CNP eReading platform.
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