DECEMBER 22, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 50 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK

Asiaweek Pictures. The Franklin eBookMan is available in Asia, but readers haven't embraced it.

A Cult of Readers
China's book lovers go online
By MARIA CHENG Hong Kong

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If it's free online in China, they will read it. So goes the wisdom of Ben Xu, CEO of bookoo.com, China's largest e-book retailer. "Chinese really like the idea of a free information exchange," Xu says. That explains, he says, the immense popularity of online books in China despite the acute shortage of the latest e-book hardware. But Chinese readers are determined. Instead of booting up a novel on a pocket-sized device, they are simply spending a few more hours in front of the PC reading text files. Unlike their North American and European counterparts, the Chinese have few qualms about reading a complete novel on a desktop monitor. So much for complaints that e-books must be soft and flexible enough to snuggle up with in bed.

Instead, the most important criterion of e-books to most Chinese is simply price. As in, there shouldn't be one. Fully nine-tenths of books on bookoo.com are free. And when the site does charge, the maximum rate is 25 cents per book. When the Beijing-based bookoo.com was first launched two years ago, it recorded an average of 300 downloads per week. Three months ago, however, the website hit an all-time high of 10,000 downloads in a single week with the release of a popular Chinese writer's latest work. Bookoo.com boasts 10,000 titles, and Xu says he has an additional 40,000 waiting to be converted to Internet-friendly text.

Not that absolutely anything goes. China's government-censored Internet has indeed become an outlet for books that wouldn't otherwise be published, but that often says more about the quality of the writing than the controversial nature of the content. In other words, authors might turn to the Net if government publishers reject manuscripts because of their poor quality. "The government has certain standards that it isn't willing to give up," says Xu. But Xu knows he has zero latitude to publish tracts on subjects like the popularity of Falungong, the spiritual movement targeted in a nationwide crackdown.

Nevertheless, the Internet is making content available to Chinese like never before. Says Xu: "It's mostly downloaded by a lot of computer geeks." What happens when many more Chinese gain regular access to the Internet and become comfortable with reading a computer? This revolution is only beginning.

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