A man of words

Memoir of a book editor and publisher reflects industry's vicissitudes over the past four decades, Yang Yang reports.

On the orange cover of the book Yisheng Yishi (roughly, a lifelong pursuit), a memoir by editor and publisher Li Xin about his four-decade career starting in 1982, is a black-and-white photo of him as a middle-aged man sitting at a desk under a lamp concentrating on a stack of papers — a draft of the Chinese version of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by US sociologist Ezra Feivel Vogel.

The book's publication in January 2013 marked the peak of his four-decade career, Li says. It has sold over 1.5 million copies.

On Douban, a major review aggregator in China, nearly 70,000 readers gave the book 9.3 points out of 10, ranking it in 18th place among the site's 250 top-rated books.