Every month thousand of books come out of Asian press in vernacular as well as English Language. Most of these books are of academic interest and are worth reading. But, unfortunately in Asia there is no centralized authority which could keep the listing of all publications. There is no institute like national library, OCLC etc. where publishers could send their publications for cataloguing. The big publishers do take care of listings so as to cash their interest but a good number of valuable titles are produced in unorganized sectors and they go unrecorded.
At times, many precious titles are published by the authors themselves. These authors normally spend all their life time savings in the publishing of book. They are practically left with little resources, which could be invested on the promotion and marketing of their work.
Some valuable titles are being published by the govt. and semi govt. publishers. They are more concerned for meeting their targets as they have to come up with a certain number of publications. They hardly make any effort to promote these publications.
Sometimes you may get the data of all published materials but then you will never come to know for sure, about the source from where it can be acquired. Some publishers come up with their websites but they seldom care to maintain it. Hence, chances are very fare of your visiting a site which is not even hit by the host organization. Visiting such sites means reading obsolete data and contents.
There have been instances of libraries acquiring a valuable title after the 4-5 years of its actual publication. Libraries pay full price for the book yet they get it much later than the actual publication. Some times, the book goes out of print and libraries remain deprived of many valuable titles.
Unlike west, there is mushrooming of publishers in the east. Every day a new publisher, big or small, emerges in the map of publishing world. Apart from this, many changes takes place like a publishing house being taken over by another one. In such a situation it really becomes difficult to acquire a title printed by the previous publisher as the new publisher may not be interested in continuing a particular title, though it may be of prime importance.
