From China Daily:
Large e-commerce players are jumping into China’s e-book market, which analystssaid could unlock the potential of this challenging sector.
E-commerce China Dangdang Inc, a US-listed online retailer in China, started selling e-bookson Wednesday, offering 50,000 titles from 200 publishers.
Yi Wenfei, the company’s vice-president, said the number of e-book titles would soon exceed100,000, since Dangdang is in talks with 100 more publishers.
“We hope the number of e-books sold on Dangdang can surpass that of printed books in thenext three to five years,” said Yi.
Dangdang is following in the footsteps of Amazon.com Inc, the biggest online retailer in theUnited States, by transforming itself from a mere online bookseller to an online retailer offeringitems ranging from electronics to food. It’s also launching its own e-book platform.
Yi said the company will provide its e-reader, priced at about 499 yuan ($78.70), in the firstquarter of 2012. The cheapest Amazon Kindle costs $79.
Dangdang is not alone in its move into e-books.
Jingdong Mall, a major business-to-consumer website, said it is preparing for an e-book salesplatform. It will offer 80,000 e-book titles at the beginning of next year, Shi Tao, vice-presidentof Jingdong Mall, told The Beijing News newspaper.
More in the article.
What format will these eBooks have? EPUB? AZW? MOBI? Something unique to China?
ePub.
90% of the 50,000 books they launched with cost RMB 10 yuan ($1.50 US).
They plan to launch 2 readers one priced at RMB 499 ($78 US) and one at RMB 299 ($47 US).
Dangdang’s cut is 40% on each book sold.