Amazon doing its bit to boost e-reading sector in China
This is the best time for the development of the e-reading industry in China, says Liu Shu, vice-president of Kindle Content at Amazon China. “And in the recent years, the government has been encouraging people to read more. Also, members of the growing middle-class in China are more willing to read,” she says.
“So, what we need to do is to make reading more convenient, without the constraints of time and space.”
In February 2016, Amazon China started a Kindle Unlimited service to access books from the Amazon library.
Speaking about reading habits, she says: “Chinese users’ choices are pretty highclass. And, in general, Chinese users love classics and educational books.”
Liu’s comments are based on Amazon China’s statistics on the top 10 most borrowed books through the Kindle Unlimited service.
Meanwhile, in the last two years, China has grown to be the world’s third largest Kindle Unlimited market after the United States and the Great Britain.
The current users of KU are 60 percent more compared with March 2017.
The library has also expanded from the original 44,000 book titles to more than 100,000, which is nearly one-fifth of the total e-books Amazon China provides, covering literature, finance and management, social sciences, children’s books and about 10,000 books in English for learners.
The number of publishers that have joined the KU service has grown from 40 two years ago to more than 200.
Among the top 100 bestselling titles at Amazon Kindle, 60 are available on the KU service, and they include Ferryman by Claire McFall, and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
At the moment, among the most borrowed books on the KU service is The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin.
Statistics also show that first-tier cities in China — Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou — are the ones where KU users borrowed the most books in the last two years, followed by second-tier cities like Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, Wuhan, Suzhou and Tianjin.
Users in developed coastal cities borrowed more books on average. And Fuzhou in Fujian province is the city where KU users most read the books they borrowed.
Separately, Amazon China, which launched its online e-book store in 2012, now has more than 500,000 titles. To cater to Chinese tastes, Ama- zon Kindle China has 40,000 titles of online literature.
Speaking about the selection on offer, Li Shuangtian, content demand director for Kindle China, says: “We pick popular works that have not been published.”
By working with the leading online literature platform, China Read and Gumi Read, Amazon China aims to give its readers more choices, he says.
Liu Shu,