Because of the number of people (students) in China, their total cost of printing textbooks was quite high. Since schools (and purchase of texts) is a government enterprise, the government was behind a search for lower cost alternatives. As a result, the news was full of China-only e-book hardware devices, and even a state-sponsored royalty-free e-book reference design. For China, these were all small ‘trials’, but they generally ran about a million hardware units apiece.

Anyway, this could be a natural outgrowth of these experiments — it may indicate that the publishing market will grow once the people have access to low-cost and readily available reading hardware.

Michael