Government and party control of all printing and publishing activities is centered in the Council on Socialist Culture and Education. This party-state organization formulates policy guidelines for the publishing industry and utilizes other government-controlled or government-owned agencies, such as the General Directorate for the Press and Printing, the various publishing houses, and book distribution centers to supervise and coordinate day-to-day operations. Within this control machinery all short- and long-range publication plans are approved, and the distribution of all printed material is specified. This central authority also allocates paper quotas, determines the number of books to be printed, and sets the prices at which all publications are to be sold. In 1972 about twenty-five publishing houses were in operation; of these, twenty-three were located in Bucharest, and one each was in Cluj and Iasi. Each of these enterprises produced books, pamphlets, periodicals, and other printed material within its own specialized field and was responsible, through its director, for the political acceptability and quality of its work. In 1969 some decentralization in publishing took place with the opening of branch offices of the larger houses in a few of the more heavily populated districts. Although this program was ostensibly initiated for the purpose of securing "a broader scope of reader preference" in the number and type of books to be published, press reports published in late 1971 indicated very little popular support for this experiment. Of the 9,399 titles published in 1969, the greatest numbers were in the fields of technology, industry, agriculture, and medicine. Also included in this group were books, treatises, studies, and reports in the general economic field as well as translations from foreign sources. This category of titles, although representing about 33 percent of those published, had an average circulation of only about 3,500 copies per title--well below the overall average of approximately 9,000. The second largest group of published titles was in the field of social sciences and represented approximately 22 percent of the total. This classification included all books dealing with political science and socioeconomic theory as well as all textbooks and materials used in the educational system. A particularly large segment of books in this area were documents and manuals used for party training, Marxist-Leninist classics, and party-directed studies and monographs dealing with the historical, philosophical, or sociological development of the communist movement.