Society

Survey indicates e-book boom in China

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-04-21 22:18

BEIJING - A survey released Thursday showed that more Chinese read e-books, or electronic books last year.

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.

The survey indicates a marked increase in the popularity of e-books. It shows that only 16.4 percent of Chinese e-book readers buy paper books after reading the electronic versions.

It also shows that the acceptable price to download an e-book from the Internet is 1.33 yuan (0.2 U.S. dollars), and nearly 54 percent of digital readers say they would pay an average of 3.45 yuan to download e-books.

Hao Zhensheng, President of CAPP, said, "Undoubtedly, the e-book boom poses a great challenge to the development of paper books, so paper book publishers should make more efforts to improve the quality of books and meet readers' demands."