The word is spreading

Another key feature of the market is the growing interest in the West in Chinese literary classics and also contemporary fiction.

One of the leading players in this field is the People's Literature Publishing House, China's largest literary publisher, based in Beijing.

It famously sold Under the Hawthorn Tree by Ai Mi to British publisher Virago with the novel subsequently made into a film by Oscar-nominated director Zhang Yimou.

It also sold the rights to Bi Feiyu's book Chinese Massage, which is set in contemporary China, to Penguin at the London Book Fair earlier this year. It will soon be published in English.

Lu Nan, a representative of the rights department of the PLPH, was at the Beijing book fair in front of an impressive display of the covers of the Chinese books that have been snapped up by foreign publishers.

"There is certainly greater interest in the West about China," she says. "Four years ago when I first started working for this company, we sold most of our books to Asia in such markets as South Korea and Japan. Now there is a much wider interest."

She says that while the spotlight has been on books sold to the English market, the real growth has been in non-English markets.

Jia Pingwa's novel Old Kiln set during the early part of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) was sold to the French publisher Gallimard and has been a popular success. The company has also recently sold Concession by Xiao Bai to an Italian publisher.

"The hardest market is actually the English market because there are so many great writers in English so it is very hard for foreign literature to get in. The French, in particular, are more inclined to take foreign literature," she says.

Lu, however, believes that the market for Chinese literature in both English and non-English speaking markets could be transformed by a novel that finally breaks though and defines Chinese literature to an international audience.

"We are trying to find that novel which gives Chinese literature a voice of its own, something that truly characterizes Chinese literature in people's minds," he says.

"The Scandinavians have done that, for example, with crime fiction but we have yet to do this."

Stephen Bourne, president of Cambridge University Press, the leading UK academic and scientific publisher, says the China market is now developing an edge even over India, an established English-language market.

"China is growing fast and the momentum is continuing. The main problem in India is inflation and the cost of borrowing money at 14 percent," he says.

"A lot of the institutions that buy from us have to borrow from the banks and that is having an impact on their orders."

He says also that books are becoming cheaper in China than in India.

"A book might be 35 yuan (4.30 euros, $5.50) in China and the same one in India the equivalent of 25 yuan but in terms of purchasing power parity the China book is cheaper and with inflation the India book is becoming more expensive all the time," he says.

With the Chinese obsession with technology, particularly iPhones and tablets, some see digital publishing as one of the major growth opportunities in China.

Digital publishing in China hit 137.8 billion yuan last year, 31 percent more than in 2010, according to GAPP. China is already the world's second-largest e-book market, making up 20 percent of global sales.