That’s the news from China Daily, which gets its headline from a 2005 Neilsen report saying about 63 percent of Chinese Internet users had made online purchases and 56 percent of the purchasers had bought reading materials, the highest ratio in the world. “The figure hasn’t been updated yet, but the rate is definitely going higher,” said Li Guoqing, CEO of Dangdang.com, China’s biggest online bookseller. The increase is happening as there’s a decrease in China’s national reading ratio over the past six years, according to the fourth national reading survey released by the China Research Institute of Publishing Science (CRIPS).
And despite the growth, online booksellers still have a long way to go in terms of sales. “It is still too early to tell,” Huang Yuhai, Chairman of 99read.com, said. “The total sales volume of three online bookstores including Dangdang, Joyo, and 99read reached 500 million yuan (US$66.7 million), taking up only 2 percent of the book market in China while Amazon.com alone holds 40 percent to 50 percent of the American market.”