From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008 is a 2010 collection of essays edited by Cynthia Brokaw and Cristopher Reed. The anthology details the history of Chinese publishing, printing, and print culture from the High Qing to the modern People's Republic.

From Woodblocks to the Internet is a collection of essays on the history of publishing and print culture in modern China, beginning in the High Qing and continuing with a deeper focus on the modern era. American sinologists Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed edited the volume. Twelve authors, including Brokaw and Reed, provided essays for the book.^[1][2] Brokaw had previously published about Chinese print history, editing Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China in 2005 alongside Kai-Wing Chow and authoring Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods in 2007.^[3] Reed, also a specialist in Chinese print culture and history, had published Gutenberg in Shanghai in 2004, detailing the history of Shanghai's publishing and print industry from 1876 to 1937.^[4]

Brokaw and Reed organized a international conference entitled "From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition". It was held at Ohio State University in November 2004, with literary historian Harvey J. Graff giving the keynote address on connections in the study of western and Chinese print culture. Papers from conference participants were collected and revised to form the essays in Woodblocks to the Internet. British sinologist Daria Berg, who was invited to the conference but was unable to attend, also submitted an essay for the book.^[5][6][7]

The book opens with an introductory essay written by Reed discussing the evolution of Chinese printing and its technological development. He dates the birth of modern print culture to the 1870s, with the spread of lithography and letterpress printing in lieu of traditional woodblock printing. Reed's introduction and many of the collected essays stress the socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors which transformed Chinese print culture, rejecting a narrative centered purely around the introduction of western printing technology.^[8][9][10]

The twelve essays of the main body of the book are divided into four sections. The first, "Modern Print Culture in Perspective", features two essays describing Chinese print culture in the 19th century, arguing that elements of print modernization emerged prior to the introduction of western print technology in the 1870s. The four essays of the second, "New Technologies and the Transition to Modern Print Culture", details specific communities of readers and writers that developed during the late Qing period. "The Golden Age of Print Capitalism" contains three essays describing the print and publishing industries of the Republican era. The final section, "Print in the Internet Era", contains three essays describing the effects of the internet on print culture in 21st century China.^[11]