Op lives in china and just bought hunger game trilogy (published by scholastic) online. And when I was checking the copyright page something reads very interestingly appears: this edition is available for distribution in china only. Wondering the reason for such restriction, scholastic has copyright to it in most part of world if my memory didn’t go wrong, so the only reasonable one I came up with is they censored texts. Unsure if they did. If they really did, does anyone know which part they censored?
Probably doesn’t have anything to do with the substance of the text, but rather with contract/business requirements. The distributor in China probably paid the original publisher a certain amount of money to sell their book in China, and that money doesn’t cover them being able to sell that intellectual property anyplace except China.
That’s probably the case. In many Asian countries, local publishers/sellers have contract with the original publishers to print and sell the book in their own and a few neighbouring countries. These books are commonly stamped with such messages, specifying which countries that book can be sold in. Most foreign books available in India have a notice saying that they are only to be sold in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and occasionally Sri Lanka or Mayanmar. This has nothing to do with censorship.
My best guess is that things are changed/removed
I don’t know if it’s censored or not, but there’s a business reason for this restriction even if there isn’t censorship. A company wants to be able to set different prices for goods in different countries depending on what price the local market will support. For example, if they set a price of $20 for the US but only $5 for China, they don’t want someone in America buying those cheap Chinese copies and importing them for sale in the US.