China to Propel Growth of E-book Industry

The Chinese government has released its first guidelines on the electronic book industry.

Insiders say the guidelines will regulate and promote growth of the booming industry.

CRI's Lin Lin has more.

The General Administration of Press and Publication released the guidelines. They address e-books as hand-held devices for reading multimedia digital content that is preset or downloaded from the Internet.

To promote the industry, the guidelines set national standards for e-book format, quality and copyrights, as well an e-book resource platform.

Chen Shaoqiang from Hanwang Technology, the e-book market leader in China, says the guidelines will create a fair and healthy market.

"Because this is a new industry of great potentiality and many producers want to grab a share in the market. However not all of them are qualified and responsible, as many of them just want to make a profit and then pull out. Plus we didn't have a standard to regulate the content of e-book products in the past, which led to disordered market competition."

China will also establish a pool of reading material for e-books and tighten market access to the industry by classifying e-book-related businesses as content producers, hardware makers, e-book retailers, wholesalers and e-book importers.

Zhang Xiaobin is a researcher from the Chinese Institute of Publishing Science.

He says the regulation on content is hugely important for the development of the industry.

"The biggest difference of e-books from other electronic products is that they are preset with content. However not all the electronic producers are capable of providing qualified content."

Zhang says the new standards support the e-book industry by improving intellectual property rights protection and content quality.

"Besides these two important points, another point is materials transformation. Now most e-book content is transformed from printing houses to device producers. During this process, there are many mistakes in either words, format or proofreading due to the lack of a supervising regulation."

Zhang Xiaobin adds that though the market is saturated with e-book producers, industry development will be hindered by a lack of core e-book production technologies.

Agreeing with his point, Chen Shaoqiang from Hanwang Technology says he is encouraged to see that the new instruction also proposes to nurture big Chinese e-book brands.

"Talking about e-books, we can immediately think about Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad in the U.S. In China, we also need to set up such influential domestic brands. So under such a national instruction, we are encouraged and protected for further upgrade and development."

Statistics show that in 2009, the number of e-books sold in China reached 3.8 million. In the first half of 2010 it produced 20 percent of the world's total e-books, second only to the United States.

For CRI, this is Lin Lin.