Only nearly 12% of publications have their content censored by the Publishing Department.

That was the information given at the year-end meeting of the Publishing Department on the afternoon of December 24. The reason for not being able to read all the published books is due to lack of human resources.

The year-end meeting of the Department of Publishing, Printing and Distribution took place on the afternoon of December 24 in Hanoi, with the participation of Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan and leaders of the Departments under the Ministry.

Deputy Minister Truong Minh Tuan (left) and Mr. Chu Van Hoa - Director of the Publishing Department chaired the Conference.

According to the report of Mr. Pham Quoc Chinh - Deputy Director of the Publishing Department, in 2014, the Department received 25,442 books with more than 360 million copies from 63 publishers. Compared to 2013, the number of books increased by 2% but the number of copies increased by 32%. As of November 20, the Department had checked and read 3,020 publications. The Department also handled 234 publications in violation of 41 publishers during the year. Thus, the Department only checked and read 11.9% of the publications.

Ms. Mai Thi Huong - Head of the Publishing Management Department - said that this unit only has 10 people doing many different jobs; and content checking is just one of the many jobs they have to do. In addition, there is a team of 12 collaborators who do post-check reading. "The job is demanding, the workload is a lot, and we are short of people, so sometimes we feel like we can't do it. We have to go to the office to do it on our days off. The Ministry (Ministry of Information and Communications) assigned us additional inspection and checking work, we try to do it. But that is just a temporary measure, and in the long run, that many people cannot do it all" - Ms. Huong said. Also due to the lack of people, the Publishing Management Department cannot censor all the books that are kept for reading. They have to choose books based on their feelings to check, as Ms. Huong said: "I only mention which books are important or have problems to read."

The key issue that the Publishing Department proposed to the Ministry of Information and Communications was to consider the personnel issue. Mr. Tran Van Sy - Deputy Director of the Department of Organization and Personnel of the Ministry of Information and Communications - present at the conference commented that the work that the Publishing Department had to undertake was very heavy, and that doubling the number of personnel would not solve it all. However, Mr. Sy said that the Publishing Department needed to choose key tasks and jobs to solve.

In addition to the lack of personnel, the figures given by the Publishing Department at the Conference show that the situation of junk books and bad books is alarming. If the number of publications that the Department read and checked in the year was 3,020, the number of violations was up to 234, accounting for 7.7%. In other words, for every 100 publications that were published and prepared for the market, there were up to 7.7 books that violated the law.

With many books in violation handled in 2014, the Publishing Department has set out key tasks for 2015, including focusing on implementing inspections and checking the law compliance of publishers, printing establishments and distribution establishments. Regarding this issue, Deputy Minister Truong Minh Tuan directed the Department to increase the speed of handling violating publications, review and rectify the publishing process as well as publishers. Mr. Truong Minh Tuan emphasized the issue of pirated books as a pressing problem and requested strong handling of pirated books.

According to VnExpress