The Shanghai 99 Readers’ Culture Co., Ltd., the owner of the store, plans to sell an e-reader application through Apple’s App Store by the end of this year in an effort to capitalize on the increasing popularity of tablet computers and mobile devices.

Mobile device users who download the application will be able to browse the company’s library and purchase copyrighted e-books for just 60 percent of the cost of buying a printed version, according to Yuang Yuhai, the company’s president.

“The Internet is an infinite bookshelf,” Huang said. He is already known for his ability to adapt to China’s changing publishing industry in the Internet era ….

Traditional publishing houses are scrambling to find solutions to what could become a dangerous trend for printed media. These companies have taken to using microblogs as a marketing tool in order to increase the visibility of their products ….

The change indicates that publishing has become a more dynamic and interactive industry, rather than merely focusing on the one-way transfer of information, according to Huang.

Ebook reading is also a prominent feature of Baidu’s new Yi mobile OS, based on Google’s Android. Baidu was said last month to have bought a 40% stake in ebook vendor Fanshu.com; the company’s earlier Wenku (“Library”) document and ebook sharing platform sparked accusations that the company was deliberately profiteering from piracy.

In April, Xinhua reported impressive growth of ebook consumption last year, with mobile phones the most popular platform:

The survey, conducted by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication (CAPP), covers more than 19,000 people from 51 cities in 29 Chinese provincial regions.

It says that Chinese people between the ages of 18 and 70 read 613 million electronic books in 2010.

Among them, 23 percent read e-books via mobile phones, up 8 percentage points from 2009. Another 3.9 percent read books on e-book readers and over 18 percent read books on the Internet, it said.

Online distribution and reading of novels has become well established in China in recent years, as Wired reported in 2007:

Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of ‘Ghost Blows Out the Light’, an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print ….

It’s a particularly lucrative game. Zhang is far from unique in China, where writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.

“Novel,” the top search term on China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.

The phenomenon has much in common with the enormous popularity in Japan of ‘keitai shousetsu’ (cellphone novels), which are distributed, read and even written on mobile phones.

Sources:

Chinese publishers adapt to rising popularity of e-books – Xinhua
Survey indicates e-book boom in China – Xinhua
The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online – Wired

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Post tags: Baidu, Baidu Wenku, books, cell phones, literature, mobile technology, publishing
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When former leaders have kept a hand in things, they have usually done so from behind the scenes. Most maintain offices and large staffs. They get copies of official documents and are quietly consulted on important matters—not least on the promotion of future leaders.

But this month saw a rare public return to the fray. Mr Zhu, who is 82 and in much more robust health than Mr Jiang, retired as prime minister in 2003. In office, Mr Zhu had a reputation as a blunt, honest reformer. He has now released a multi-volume collection of speeches and letters from his years in power. China’s state-controlled press has given his work lots of attention, even highlighting some of the most pointed remarks made by a man famous for his short temper and sharp tongue. Among these were his contention that a government full of yes-men ill serves the needs of the people. Chinese leaders, he also railed, should devote less time to lavish banquets and pointless meetings, and more time to solving problems ….

Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, says he is surprised that Mr Zhu is now being so forthright, but predicts that public interventions by former leaders—“old-man politics”—could well increase. Not only is the number of ex-leaders growing. A rise in factional politics and greater differences of opinion among a new (and weaker) generation of leaders might also undermine unity at the centre. China’s old men will no doubt want to say something about it all.

At the Tsinghua University centenary celebrations referred to in the article, Zhu told students that he watched CCTV’s prime-time news show every evening “to see what their bullshit is”, and recommended that they read ‘Will the Boat Sink the Water?‘, a banned book about downtrodden peasants and corrupt officials: see ‘Our Maverick Premier Takes an Alma Mater Bow‘ on CDT. Beyond just making provocative remarks, Zhu has also provided political protection for investigative journalist Wang Keqin.

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Post tags: books, leadership reshuffling, retirement, succession, Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping, Zhu Rongji
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When Li Xiang got home with a pile of books he had bought from a bookstore at a Shanghai business school, he started to happily flip through one of them until he noticed something odd; pages 16 and 17 were stuck together ….

Using a razor and the skill of a surgeon, Li managed to pry apart the glued-together pages to find that the offending passage described China’s legal system. On page 18, he also found lines of text that were redacted with sloppy strokes in black ink. Carefully scrutinizing the passage, Li could see the section was an explanation of China’s one-party rule ….

Li remembers how he had to play a little game with CNPIEC’s Shanghai office when he tried to subscribe to a foreign newspaper. Chinese mainland citizens can not directly subscribe to daily foreign language newspapers.

According to the import-export monopoly’s Shanghai branch’s website, subscription services for foreign newspapers and periodicals are restricted to people and companies from overseas, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. A photocopy of a business license or passport is required proof.

“It was very interesting to see the way they dealt with it,” said Li. “I just asked my German friend for help. I used his ID to order the International Herald Tribune but had it delivered to my address,” he said.

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Post tags: books, censorship, newspapers
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Pirated editions of the Nobel prize-winning author’s most famous novel – “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race,” according to William Kennedy – have been rife in China for decades. The piracy so enraged Marquez on a visit to the country in 1990 that he swore that even 150 years after his death his books would not be authorised in China, according to Chinese newspaper the Global Times.

But Thinkingdom House editor-in-chief Chen Mingjun refused to take no for an answer, writing a letter to the author in 2008 which according to the Global Times read: “We pay our respects to you across the Pacific Ocean, making every effort, shouting ‘great master!’ just like you did to your idol Ernest Hemingway across the streets in Paris … We believe that you’d also wave your hand and shout back ‘Hello friend!’ just like Hemingway did.” …

Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China, which publishes the English language edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, said the size of the advance had “already created an enormous amount of interest” in the novel, despite it being “widely available in pirated forms for a long time”.

“I think they’ll be lucky if they can meaningfully address the presence of cheap pirated formats out on the streets, though,” she said.

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Post tags: books, literature
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The transition from one FYP plan to the next is a key moment in China, closely watched by foreign and Chinese analysts. After 30 years of breakneck growth, with all the attendant difficulties and consequences of that model of development, the 12th FYP demonstrates a much more robust ambition to make the difficult transition towards a more sustainable model. If it is successful, the 12th FYP could prove to be a pivotal moment in Chinese development, of international as well as domestic importance.

China’s strategic challenge is to get onto a more sustainable development path, while meeting public expectations of improved living standards and employment. The current development model is exhausted for a number of familiar reasons: it is still too inefficient, too wasteful of energy and natural resources, it generates too many damaging externalities and it depends on an abundant pool of cheap labour, which China no longer has. At a similar stage of development, Japan, Korea and Taiwan all made the transition to higher value, more innovative and more technologically advanced models, much as China is trying to do today. In China’s case, the urgency is the greater because of three decades of damage to water, air, soil and human health, with the attendant social unrest they have brought.

The book is available in EPUB and PDF formats (free) and on Kindle ($1, Amazon’s minimum price).

Also on chinadialogue is managing editor Meng Si’s post on the results of the 2011 Environmental Press Awards. (Jonathan Watts’ post at the The Guardian, which co-sponsors the awards, was featured on CDT late last week.) The post includes links to chinadialogue’s translations of four of the five top prize winning articles:

Best investigative report

A green paper tiger?

By Lu Zongshu, Southern Weekly

Best in-depth report (two winners)

1) Zijin’s poisoned legacy

By Yang Chuanmin, Southern Metropolitan Daily

2) The Alarm from Zhouqu

By Gong Jing, Wang Heyan, Zhang Ruidan, New Century Weekly

Best human interest story

The birdwatching lama of Qinghai

By Geng Dong, Shanshui Conservation Centre

Most influential report

Burned by the sun: solar subsidies and poor oversight in China

By Yuan Ying, Southern Weekly

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 12th Five-Year Plan, books, environment, Isabel Hilton, sustainable development
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The choice is overwhelming on the China shelf of any bookshop – everything from macroeconomic tomes to travel guides. Why did you pick ‘life stories’ as your theme?

One of the real challenges for foreigners trying to think about China, and have it make sense to them, is to really get to think of it as a country populated by individuals. There’s a strong tendency in so much of the writing about China to deal in broad generalisations, in which we lose the diversity of the population. So focusing on biography, or life stories, seemed to be a good way to go against the grain ….

Could you imagine someone writing a flesh-and-blood biography of Hu Jintao, or Xi Jinping, or any other more current Chinese leader?

Not one that would make for compelling reading! Though I recently wrote a piece for Time magazine about how when Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao, he seemed in comparison a more down-to-earth, unexciting and pragmatic character – but now, in comparison to Hu Jintao, Deng seems positively charismatic. So we’ve had a kind of steady progression away from larger-than-life Chinese leaders.

Previously featured on China Digital Times are selections from Victor Shih on China’s economy, Evan Osnos on a broad range of China-related reading, Richard Baum on obstacles to reform in China and Xinran on understanding China. Other instalments available in the archives cover popular protest in China, China’s place in the global economy, Uyghur nationalism, the country’s environmental crisis and more.

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Post tags: books, Deng Xiaoping, factory workers, Hu Jintao, Mao Zedong, qing dynasty, Xi Jinping
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It’s good that you’re covering this topic. Wherever we are in the world, we all now need to understand the Chinese economy.

Yes, and especially some of its more sceptical aspects. Exports from China are still huge. It grew faster than almost any country in the world in 2009 and 2010. A recent calculation suggests its GDP has surpassed the United States on a purchasing power parity basis. But there are weaknesses in the Chinese economy that the educated reader needs to know about.

What do people get most wrong when they think of the Chinese economy?

The biggest misperception about China is that it’s a dynamic market economy – it isn’t. It’s a fast-growing, state-dominated economy with some dynamic, private-market aspects. If you look at investment, a main driver of growth, much of it is going to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or shareholding companies dominated by state entities. Or it’s going directly to government investments carried out at a central or local level. The misperception has abated recently following Richard McGregor’s book on the Chinese Communist Party. People are realising that the party is still behind much of what happens in China.

Selections from Evan Osnos on a broad range of China-related reading, Richard Baum on obstacles to reform in China and Xinran on understanding China have been featured on CDT in the past. Other instalments available in the archives cover popular protest in China, China’s place in the global economy, Uyghur nationalism, the country’s environmental crisis and more.

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Post tags: books, chinese communist party, chinese economy, state-owned enterprises
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Why is it so important to you?

Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.

For example, there is a part which sums up how important food is in Chinese society. Xueqin writes about an aubergine recipe, which is a famous dish in the book, where the mother describes to her daughter and grandchildren how you need to wash the aubergines in snow, soak them with spring dew, pickle them with flowers from summer to season them and the thorns from autumn. And these are known as four season aubergines. That is so beautiful. And why I think this book is so important is because it has helped Chinese culture to survive despite all the political upheavals and civil wars which have taken place since it was written.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, cultural identity, Xinran
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A chance conversation in Macau last year between the head of the Harvard-Yenching Library and the director of the National Library of China, two men with a passion for ancient texts, led to the signing yesterday of an ambitious, six-year pact to digitize Harvard’s treasure trove of 51,000 rare Chinese books.

Officials from Harvard and the National Library of China would not release exact costs, other than to say it was a “multimillion-dollar’’ project and that the Chinese government is paying most expenses. Harvard staff will be responsible for capturing images of the fragile books, scrolls, and artifacts, one of the largest collections outside Asia, using high-tech cameras in its state-of-the-art lab at Widener Library.

Once completed, these images dating as far back as the Song ynasty in 960 AD, will be publicly available for free on the Web to scholars in China and elsewhere.

“We need to change the mindset that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors,’’ said James Cheng, the head librarian at Harvard-Yenching, a separate building just outside Harvard Yard. “A library is not a museum.’’

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, digital books, Harvard, National Library of China
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Two Chinese writers slaved for 48 hours straight to produce an “instant” biography of late singer Michael Jackson, despite having never met him, a state-run newspaper said on Monday.

The book, called “Moonwalk in Paradise”, hit the bookshelves over the weekend, the China Daily said, after the authors subsisted on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and worked round-the-clock to complete it.

While they are not as popular as the Taiwanese and Hong Kong stars who dominate the music scene in China, Western artists are making inroads in the local market, thanks to young fans.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, Michael Jackson
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