Amazon doing its bit to boost e-reading sector in China

The library has also expanded from the original 44,000 book titles to more than 100,000, which is nearly one-fifth of the total e-books Amazon China provides, covering literature, finance and management, social sciences, children's books and about 10,000 books in English for learners.

The number of publishers that have joined the KU service has grown from 40 two years ago to more than 200. Among the top 100 bestselling titles at Amazon Kindle, 60 are available on the KU service, and they include Ferryman by Claire McFall, and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

At the moment, among the most borrowed books on the KU service is The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin.

Statistics also show that first-tier cities in China－Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou－are the ones where KU users borrowed the most books in the last two years, followed by second-tier cities like Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, Wuhan, Suzhou and Tianjin.

Users in developed coastal cities borrowed more books on average. And Fuzhou in Fujian province is the city where KU users most read the books they borrowed.

Separately, Amazon China, which launched its online e-book store in 2012, now has more than 500,000 titles. To cater to Chinese tastes, Amazon Kindle China has 40,000 titles of online literature.

Speaking about the selection on offer, Li Shuangtian, content demand director for Kindle China, says: "We pick popular works that have not been published."

By working with the leading online literature platform, China Read and Gumi Read, Amazon China aims to give its readers more choices, he says.

The books most borrowed

The top most borrowed books are three mystery novels by Higashino Keigo; a personal finance book, Rich Dad Poor Dadby Robert Kiyosaki; a conversational skills book, Confident Conversation: How to Communicate Successfully in Any Situationby Mike Bechtle; a time management book, The Skinny on Time Managementby Jim Randel; a social psychology book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mindby Gustave Le Bon; a novel called The Storied Life of AJ Fikryby Gabrielle Zevin and the English version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stoneby JK Rowling.