Introduction:

In order to measuring a country's media in scale, evaluating the scales of different media and different historical periods, a unified information metrological standard is required as a basis for evaluation. This article sketched out the historical evolution of standard system of publishing industry in China, focused the same metrological units, and provides a quantitative basis for history research of China’s publishing industry.

Method:

In national standards and legal regulations, the metrological units are International Standard Book Number (ISBN), International Standard Serial Numbering (ISSN), and International Standard Recording Code (ISRC). After the recommended standards cited into regulations, it has the administrative binding, which endows these serial numbers with mandatory, and the amount of all publishing products could be able to control in plan.

From China’s Publishing Yearbook and China's News and Publishing Statistical Compilations we gather statistics data. Through calculating books, newspapers, periodicals, Audio & Video products, and electronic publications total varieties numbers, total copies numbers, and total printed sheet numbers, seeking out the average printed sheet number of single variety, we can estimates out accumulated print sheet amount of China. This printed sheet amount can be converted into layout words, and unified transformed into byte number. At last the total amount of information generated by the various published forms could be roughly estimated.

Conclusions:

In the period 1949-2010, there were cumulative 2765097 kinds of published books, the amount of layout characters is 8.162x1011 bytes; in the same way, the amount of periodicals is 4.98×1011 bytes, the amount of newspaper is 2.16×1012 bytes.

1991-2010, there were cumulative 401536 types of audio & video CD published, in accordance with the 650M per CD conversion rate, the total volume is 2.61×1014 bytes.

1996-2010, there were cumulative 150663 species of electronic publishing production; total capacity is 9.7931×1013 bytes.

Integrated calculation of the above published forms, in the period 1949-2010, the total amount media publication in China is about 3.6240×1014 bytes (330T).

With the rapid development of network publishing and digital publishing and absence of national standards in government management, how to measure the information scale becomes a new problem.