Of all the developing countries, China is perhaps the most advanced in terms of digital publishing. E-reader manufacturers, digital ecosystems and mobile phone companies have a huge market volume, as well as plentiful economic resources. The State, for its part, keeps an iron grip on all the players’ movements and actively encourages the restructuring of [...]
Presentation
Technical data
Surface area: 9,596,960 km2. Population: 1,331,460,000 (2009) Urban population: 44% (2009) GDP (nominal): US$ 4,984,731,371,688 (2009) GDP per capita: US$ 3,744 (2009) Unemployment: 4.2% (2009, official figures) Official language: Mandarin (Putonghua). There are a host of local dialects. Politics and society: China is a socialist republic governed by the Communist Party. It is the most [...]
The world’s factory. China’s leading role in e-reader production
As is well known, China has for decades been a world centre for manufacturing all kinds of goods including footwear, textiles, toys, chemical products and electronic items. Over 30 years after the first economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, its low labour costs and its growing domestic market have made China one of the most dynamic [...]
The new giants of online transactions
The extraordinary flow of goods towards foreign and domestic markets has enabled the emergence of major players in electronic commerce in China. Around 1999, the Chinese entrepreneur Ma Yun – Jack Ma –, a native of Hangzhou, created the site Alibaba, in partnership with 17 co-founders, as a trading platform for importers and exporters of all kinds [...]
Ecosystems and private digital aggregators
As we have pointed out in other sections, one of the ways to elude the process of price cannibalization affecting hardware industries and online sales is by developing ecosystems that integrate different units of the business. In the case of digital publishing, one alternative would be to combine the sale of content with the distribution [...]
Migration to digital, a State policy
As we recalled at the beginning of the chapter, China has been undertaking economic reforms for over 30 years. Since 2001 in particular – when the country joined the World Trade Organization –, the Chinese public sector has been going through a process of significant restructuring, and both publishing houses and bookstores have accompanied this shift. [...]
Mobile phones
If the earnings brought in by e-books scarcely amounted to 1.83% of the electronic publishing sector in 2009, there was another field that performed far better. Indeed, according to GAPP itself, content for mobile phones represented 40% of that same total, meaning that the platform on which the greatest flow of digital content is circulating [...]
The many challenges of the digital age
As we have attempted to highlight, new technologies are profoundly transforming the Chinese publishing world. However, there are many challenges to be faced by publishers in this digital age – particularly by small and medium players with private capital.[1] To begin with, digital piracy is a spectre that, for obvious reasons, looms large over all publishing [...]
Possible trends
There are a number of forces within Chinese digital publishing that are likely to be sustained in the medium term. Below we will enumerate the most significant trends that we have identified: First of all, like in Brazil and India, a new middle class is being rapidly incorporated into the market, particularly in the consumption [...]