The Shanghai Book Fair closed Sunday. Numbers on the book fair as reported in The Beijing News put 300,000 visitors spending more than 25 million yuan in cash over nine days (Danwei makes no guarantees about the veracity of any statistics quoted about the publishing industry). Orders for Shanghai publishers totalled 115 million yuan, and for other regions 87.14 million yuan. Someone even forked over 180,000 yuan for a set of string-bound volumes of the Twenty-Four Histories.

One of the big winners was Yu Hua, whose new novel Brothers went on sale at the fair. It topped the list of orders from Shanghai region publishers, and by closing time it had run through the first two printings, totalling 250,000 copies. The publisher, Shanghai Literature Press, is preparing a third printing of 100,000 copies. Brothers enters the fiction list at #9 this week. Orders for Yu Hua's previous novels, including To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, have benefitted from the new book's strong debut.

The last time Danwei looked at children's lit, the school semester was just ending, and the bestseller list was largely made up of collections of self-esteem-building fables and parenting manuals. Now that it's August, fiction dominates. Pictured at the top is the cover of Tomboy Dai An (#4) by Yang Hongying, who specializes in children's stories about clever, rambunctious boys and girls. This particular book is the story of a girl and her single mother.

But that's about it for reality - kids are reading adventure and fantasy during the holidays. The rest of the list is Harry Potter, Tiger Team Special Edition, and Ultraman. Once again Harry Potter #6 is the top-selling children's book, despite the recent completion of an online translation into Chinese done by fans. Philosopher's Stone and Goblet of Fire are up there, too.

The Tiger Team novels, by Austrian writer Thomas Brezina, sell incredibly well in China. Nearly 7 million copies of the various books in the original 30 volume series had been sold between 2001 and the beginning of 2005. The publisher claims that these numbers put Mr. Brezina ahead of J. K. Rowling as most widely read foreign author.

At the beginning of this year, the ten-volume Tiger Team Special Edition was launched, featuring more involved stories and more sophisticated mystery-solving tools. One of the attractions of the Tiger Team series is that each book invites the reader to assist the heroes in solving their problems. To do this, the books are accompanied by special toys. The cover pictured here advertises "Three Special Decoder Cards Included."

Ultraman has been on the children's list for most of this season. From the publisher's date on the front of book pictured here, as well as the phonetically-translated title, this appears to be a Chinese version of the 1996 series of Ultraman Tiga stories (broadcast on the mainland in 2004), in which the hero has three battle modes.

Ultraman is currently involved in a trademark dispute among companies in Japan, Thailand, and China. The Japanese producer, Tsuburaya Productions, claims that over 80% of Ultraman products on the Chinese mainland are pirated, and has sued around 10 companies for illegally producing and selling Ultraman merchandise.

And in the midst of this is a plan to produce original Ultraman adventures rather than translating and dubbing Japanese versions. Media regulations that favor domestic programming, an audience hungry for Chinese settings and characters, an industry looking for a native superhero (if an alien from the Land of Light can be called native), and the inability of Japanese producers to keep up with Chinese demand lead domestic companies to believe that there's a market for a Chinese Ultraman, once the dust clears on the right issues.

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The juvenile bestseller list for the week of 8/6--8/12:

1. (1) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling: British version. (J.K. 罗琳, 《哈利·波特与混血王子》)
2. (3) A Night With No Adults edited by Liu Haitao. (刘海涛, 《没有大人的夜晚》)
3. (4) Light for a Book-Dream edited by Liu Haitao: subtitled One hundred stories to motivate middle school students. Similar to the popular A Night With No Adults (#10). (刘海涛, 《书梦的灯》)
4. (5) Tomboy Dai An by Yang Hongying. (杨红樱, 《假小子戴安》)
5. (2) Harry Potter #6 U.S. edition.
6. (10) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling. (《哈利·波特与魔法石》)
7. (9) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling. (《哈利·波特与火焰杯》)
8. (-) Tiger Team Special Edition by Thomas Brezina. Austrian mystery-adventure stories. (托马斯·布热齐纳, 《超级版冒险小虎队》)
9. (-) Mischievous Ma Xiaotiao by Yang Hongying. (杨红樱, 《淘气包马小跳》)
10. (6) New Ultraman Tiga. The Japanese galactic hero in comic book form. (《迪迦奥特曼》)

The overall bestseller list for the week of 8/6--8/12:

1. (1) Modern Chinese Dictionary (fifth edition), published by The Commercial Press. (《现代汉语词典》)
2. (2) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling: British version. (J.K. 罗琳, 《哈利·波特与混血王子》)
3. (3) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown: For the past few months this novel has been a best-seller shared by the mainland, Taiwan, and the United States. Digital Fortress is a perennial on the fiction list, too. (丹·布郎,《达·芬奇密码》)
4. (4) Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong: Another long-running best-seller, this loosely-plotted novel is being made into a movie (mentioned earlier on Danwei). (姜戎,《狼图腾》)
5. (10) My Normandy by Tang Shizeng: New work of photojournalism commemorating the 60th anniversary of victory in the war against fascism. (唐师曾, 《我的诺曼底》)
6. (6) Short Stories, Great Truths complete set. Classic parables with wisdom for today. (《小故事大道理全集》)
7. (9) About Going to Work by Zhu Deyong: The author is a cartoonist from Taiwan whose earlier work was the inspiration for the incredibly popular television series Pink Ladies. A sample of Work is available on Sina. (朱德庸,《关于上班这件事》)
8. (7) A Night With No Adults edited by Liu Haitao. (刘海涛, 《没有大人的夜晚》)
9. (8) Light for a Book-Dream edited by Liu Haitao: subtitled One hundred stories to motivate middle school students. Similar to the popular A Night With No Adults (#10). (刘海涛, 《书梦的灯》)
10. (-) Rush to the Dead Summer by Guo Jingming (Danwei previously translated the title as 1995-2005 Not Yet Summer Solstice): Novel is serialized on Sina. (郭敬明,《1995-2005夏至未至》)

Bestseller rankings are taken from the Friday Book Review section in The Beijing News, which compiles its data from the city's major online and brick & mortar bookstores.