TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

E-novels take off in China—boosting profits of p-publishers

By David Rothman

“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.” – Wired News.

The TeleRead take: Watch out, Western publishers. Copyright hawks in the U.S. and elsewhere fret over protection of literary classics. But what if these works in the future lose value in China either as legitimate purchases or as pirate fodder—because the Chinese are too busy creating for themselves?

Leading search term: “Novel”

“Novel” is the leading search term on the biggest search engine in the country, and more than 100,000 amateur scribes are writing out installments. Some e-novels are finding their way into print, with Zhang, an office worker in his 30s, having sold 600,000 p-copies of a net novel viewed more than six million times. Cory Doctorow, who has often talked up nonDRMed e-books as promoters of p-books, should be happy.

The biggest hits among the Web-born books are inspiring films. Perhaps Hollywood needs to pay attention, too, not just large Western publishres. If the long-term economic and cultural decline of the United States continues, other nations including China will eventually fill the vacuum. Hollywood is a dream factory. What if life in America isn’t quite as dreamworthy as before?

DRM angle

All kinds of questions arise about the future. Just how competitive will DRMed wares from Western countries be against all the Chinese competition without such hassles? I was pleased to see the Wired article point to a Gadget Lab post on the toxicity of DRM for e-books—a piece quoting a TeleRead entry, by the way.

If large publishing conglomerates are worried about theft, then perhaps they need to experiment with compromise measures such as social DRM, which would be less of a burden on consumers.

Hardware

Meanwhile can any TeleBlog readers in China, or recent travelers there, enlighten us about the hardware the Chinese are using to read the e-novels. I suspect that the desktop is still the main machine, but that this will change as prices decline and tablets and dedicated e-book readers become more attractive. Will we see Chinese-targeted versions of the OLPC convertible laptop repositioned as e-reading tablets? And when that happens, what becomes of the p-publishers, many of whose customers may not bother to buy paper books? Perhaps the smarter ones will want to get into interactive e-books now and work with authors to enhance the value of the electronic offerings.