The price of knowledge

GetAbstract, a Swiss company, was a pioneer in the West in cashing in on the knowledge economy and using the internet to promote it.

Founded in 1999, getAbstract provides e-library of about 15,000 condensed business book summaries mainly to big companies such as Boeing, Deutsche Bank and IBM to help their staff keep up abreast of current knowledge.

In April the company formed a partnership with Dedao in which summaries of foreign books are made available in audio form in the app in Mandarin.

"We always believe that good content is worth something," says the co-founder, Patrick Brigger. "You have to pay for quality content ... and this trend is even stronger than it was 20 years ago."

Brigger says there is so much information on the internet, but a lot of it is mediocre, and his company tries to solve that problem by sifting through, selecting and curating good content.

He compares getAbtract's product to the papyrus scrolls in the old library of Alexandria in Egypt, where every scroll has a brief summary at the top.

"That's our vision－anything with good content should have a summary so people can decide if it is the text they want to read," Brigger says.

"It saves time, and when the price is reasonable, people are willing to pay for it."

The company has sold more than 12 million licenses for individuals and corporate entities, he says.

It will soon begin publishing Inside China, which will provide English-language summaries of in-depth reports originally published in Mandarin.

Rena Xie, a Chinese American freelance translator and writer, has been working on the project since February.

Xie scours through mountains of Chinese news reports and industry analyses every day, boiling them down into summaries of around five hundred words.

Topics she covers are mostly current business trends in China, such as the real estate market, the franchise of entertainment products and mobile payments.

"A lot of the information in Western media is dumbed down for the reader to understand," Xie says.

She wants to present foreign readers short but to-the-point information with an authentic "Chineseness".

Speaking of the fledgling business of paid content in China, Xie is optimistic about apps like Dedao.

"It is getting people into the habit of respecting quality stuff and paying for it," she says.

The people who pay for Dedao or getAbstract generally have a business orientation, and there are also people who pay for cultural content.