Dynamic growth in China's ebook market

Figures quoted by China Daily show that publishers in China are benefiting from 300m users of mobile devices who read electronic books. The market is up 25% year on year and reached $1.7 billion in sales last year.

The dynamic growth in the Chinese market is diverging from the global market for ebooks, which showed a peak of ebook reader sales of 23.2m in 2011 but had fallen to 7.8m by 2015, in a trend that has been previously noted.

China's vast market is still opening up to sales of readers and ebooks, with mobiles playing a key role. The result is that China now has 8% of the global market for sales of ebook readers, second only to the US. However this vast potential market already has annual sales of printed books of 62.4m units.

Since ebook sales are still such a small proportion of print sales, the potential for growth is considerable as this huge market opens up, particularly through young people reading books on their mobiles.

Difficult though it can be to get western books into China, this presents a huge opportunity for international publishers and their authors, although of course the biggest potential is for Chinese writers reaching readers in their own country and beyond.

BEIJING - China's publishing industry is sizzling with e-books and reading devices