Chinese readers talk with a Russian author at the booth for Russia during the fair. Photo by Chen Xiaogen/China Daily

He credits the change to China's rise on the international stage, and says that Chinese author Mo Yan's winning of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2012 made the world notice Chinese literature.

In 2013, the book fair witnessed a total of 3,667 copyright deals being signed, an 11-percent year-on-year increase, including for some 2,091 export copyright deals, according to the China Publishing and Media Journal, a Beijing-based industry publication.

Moreover, in the past, most books that found their way to the libraries of Western readers were about traditional culture or beauty and sex, but now contemporary Chinese literature has begun to dominate such collections, according to the journal.

Of the 37,640 titles of Chinese books collected by more than 20,000 overseas libraries in 2013, some 79 percent is on contemporary literature, one of its reports released during the book fair says.

"There was always a demand from abroad for Chinese literature, but somehow, the market demand seems to have increased in recent years," says Lu Nan, who works in the international cooperation department of the People's Literature Publishing House.

The publishing house started to export literature copyrights in the 1990s, primarily to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and some Asian countries and regions, such as Vietnam.