Chinese versus Japanese editions

Last week, I got news from Springer Verlag about possibly two new editions of my books, one in Chinese and one in Japanese. These were bad news and good news: the bad news was that the Chinese edition was actually a reprint of our original book,  Monte Carlo Statistical Method, by a Chinese publishing company. Supposedly restricted to the Chinese interior market. While this agreement is within the terms of our contract, it will be disastrous for our sales of the original 2004 Springer edition since those cheaper copies have already found their way to American and European markets (I got a copy by the mail only today, but some students in the US do have it!)

I actually fail to understand the publisher’s point in giving away sales of a reasonably successful book for a cheaper version with a much lower return. Since this Chinese publisher is also (re)printing Hastie, Tibshirani and Freedman’ The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, as well as Erich Lehmann’s Theory of Point Estimation, we are not an isolated case. But this does not make the move less frustrating or more understandable!

The good news is about the potential translation of our book Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R into Japanese, as was recently the case for the book of Phil Spector on Data Manipulation with R. There seems to be a reasonable market for R (and Splus) books in Japan for those translations to take place…