Here’s some irony for you. TheNextWeb reports that a coalition of nine well-known Chinese writers is suing Apple for 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for selling illegal e-books of their works on its App Store. The writers have asked Apple provide copyright certification of all works being sold on the App Store, but Apple has declined to do so. China, of course, is infamous as a hotbed of pirated and counterfeited goods, though it has been trying to change that image lately. It would appear from this story that Apple has been a bit lax in verifying ownership of...

From China Daily: Large e-commerce players are jumping into China's e-book market, which analystssaid could unlock the potential of this challenging sector. E-commerce China Dangdang Inc, a US-listed online retailer in China, started selling e-bookson Wednesday, offering 50,000 titles from 200 publishers. Yi Wenfei, the company's vice-president, said the number of e-book titles would soon exceed100,000, since Dangdang is in talks with 100 more publishers. "We hope the number of e-books sold on Dangdang can surpass that of printed books in thenext three to five years," said Yi. Dangdang is following in the footsteps of Amazon.com Inc, the biggest online retailer in theUnited States, by transforming itself from a mere online bookseller to an online retailer offeringitems ranging from electronics to food. It's also launching its own e-book platform. Yi said the company will provide its e-reader, priced at about 499 yuan ($78.70), in the firstquarter of 2012. The cheapest Amazon Kindle costs $79. Dangdang is not alone in its move into e-books. Jingdong Mall, a major business-to-consumer website, said it is preparing for an e-book salesplatform. It will offer 80,000 e-book titles at the beginning of next year, Shi Tao, vice-presidentof Jingdong Mall, told The Beijing News newspaper. More in the article....

PaidContent reports that, after seeing a great deal of growth in 2010 (especially in the 4th quarter), e-reader sales in China have fallen off considerably for two of the last three quarters according to Analysys International’s Enfodesk. The third quarter of 2010 saw a growth rate of 9.9% and the fourth saw 20.1%, but the first quarter of 2011 showed a 4.2% decline, followed by 2.2% growth and another 5.1% decline in subsequent quarters. Enfodesk places the blame on problems at Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon, and suggests one of the major causes is a lack of content for e-readers...

From Shelf Awareness: Dangdang, which is often called the Amazon of China, plans to launch its own e-book platform later this month. Yi Wen-fei, the company's v-p, said there are currently 50,000 digital books ready for purchase from more than 100 publishers, PaidContent reported, noting that Dangdang’s digital books will be available "on its own apps for iOS and Android, which are believed to be launching soon, and on its own-brand e-reader which should appear in the first quarter of 2012."Dangdang now joins competitors Hanvon and Shanda in the Chinese e-book market, but will have a dramatic impact on those two companies,...

From the University of Michigan News Service: Scholarly gems are often found by sifting through dusty archives in foreign lands thousands of miles away. But sometimes they’re discovered just by doing some office cleaning on campus. That’s what happened recently at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Staffers who were tidying up a storage room found a stunning collection of rare propaganda papercut images from the Cultural Revolution—a period of massive political upheaval in China that began in 1966 and lasted about a decade. One papercut shows the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his hand-picked successor, Lin...

The latest issue of ACCESS, a newspaper for librarians in Asia, looks at Singapore-based iG Publishing, which now offers "some 50,000 titles from more than 100 reputable North American, European and Asian academic publishers." The article doesn't go into much detail on the underlying technology, but it looks like iG relies on PDF and the Adobe Acrobat Reader DRM plugin called FileOpen. Read the full article at www.aardvarknet.info....

China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reports on a survey results released yesterday by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication about ebook usage in China. Who Was Surveyed? More than 19,000 people in 51 cities and 29 Chinese provincial regions were surveyed. Findings “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.” “Only 16.4 percent of Chinese e-book readers buy paper books after reading the electronic versions.” The...

Previously the Chinese government has started to crack down on physical piracy (although they have a long way to go) and now it seems as if they are making some efforts in the digital realm as well. TorrentFreak reports: Just before the holidays there was an investigation by the authorities into 500 music download sites. The Ministry of Culture said that 237 of those sites (list) were suspected of illegal activities, citing a lack of licensing, failure to register and/or distribution of copyright infringing material. On Monday the authorities issued a list of music – much of it from Universal, RCA,...

I've often expressed the opinion here that mobile phones are a major way of bringing literature to people - far more important than the classic ereader, such as the Kindle, that we see in the rich developed countries. Now comes another example of this. From the Irish Times: Mobile phones are becoming pocket libraries for millions of avid readers in China, writes CLIFFORD COONAN in Beijing. ... Millions of Chinese have abandoned traditional books for mobile phone novels, and as smartphones start to become more popular in China, the genre is getting ever more popular. The novels are punchy and...

Dan Bloom has an article in TechEye about: Taohua.com, a website that sells digital content inside Communist China, recently did something you don't see too often in China: It apologised for selling 50,000 pirated e-books, with a statement saying all 50,231 pirated units had been removed from the online offerings. In a web dispatch from Shanghai, publishing executive Wuping Zhao - who graduated from the prestigious Columbia University Publishing Course in New York a year ago - noted that versions of most bestsellers in China are available online as pirated e-book editions, even via mainstream portals like Baidu.com and Sina.com. More info in...

From the Manila Bulletin: Unauthorized Chinese versions of popular Japanese novels, including works by best-selling author Haruki Murakami, have been sold as e-books on Apple's online store, Japanese media have reported. Digital versions of Murakami's "1Q84" and of crime novels by Keigo Higashino were being sold without the authors' permission for a few hundred yen (a few dollars) each, the Kyodo News agency and the Asahi daily reported. More info in the article....

eBookNewser has a summary article about this phenomenon. Here's a snippet: The South China Post has more: “Some Net users are accustomed to using proxy servers to circumvent the mainland restriction, but the Kindle makes this unnecessary. ‘I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise I got there,’ a mainland blogger said. ‘And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.’ More info at the site....