Electronic readers' jump in popularity just beginning

An Amazon worker displays a Kindle reader, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. LONG WEI / FOR CHINA DAILY

The US-based e-commerce company has worked with more than 660 Chinese publishers to provide old classics and modern books to readers on Kindle. In the past three years, the devices have offered 420,000 Chinese titles, Aitken said. China is now the second-largest market for Kindle after the United States.

Besides books, users can also send articles from Chinese phone applications to their e-reader, using such functions as "send to Kindle" on WeChat.

"If they (readers) come cross an article they like from People's Daily or the magazine Lifeweek on WeChat, they can send it directly to Kindle," Aitken said. Since this service started in 2015, the annual traffic for such posts has grown by 50 percent.

For Amazon, books published simultaneously last year in print and for Kindles increased by 60 percent compared with 2015, said Elaine Chang, CEO of Amazon China. The sale of books that were published in both formats at the same time were double those for books published only in one, she added.

Many readers consider flexibility important in their reading platforms.

In 2015, Chinese adults spent more than 62 minutes reading text on cellphones as compared with a little less than 34 minutes in 2014, according to an annual reading report released by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication in April. Many use phones to read online literature.

One of the country's biggest providers of online literature is China Reading, an arm of internet giant Tencent.

The China Reading app, launched in 2010, has attracted hundreds of millions of users. Tencent launched the app after absorbing many independent platforms such as Cloudary, once the largest interactive online writing platform in China.

Wu Wenhui, CEO of China Reading, said in previous media interviews that his company plans to launch its own electronic devices.

China Reading now offers more than 10 million works, covering over 200 categories, such as romance, self-help and classics. It has about 600 million users, and every day about 30 million read via the app on mobile devices and other platforms.

As many as 4 million people are writing for the platform on a wide range of topics, and in 2016 alone, China Reading paid about 100 million yuan to its writers. They include top names like Zhu Hongzhi.