In a move that creates what the South China Morning Post calls "the Amazon of e-books," two of China's major online publishing companies--Tencent Literature and Shanda Cloudary--are combining to become Yuewen Group, which will be China's largest online publishing and e-book company, with 1,200 employees and more than three million books. Tencent Literature is owned by Internet giant Tencent; Shanda Cloudary is an e-publishing subsidiary of games developer Shanda and had earlier merged with Qidian.
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| Tencent CEO Wu Wenhui | |
In a letter to staff, Yuewen CEO Wu Wenhui called for creating a nationwide reading system in the next decade, saying, "In the future, I hope everyone from an eight year old to an 80 year old will be able to use digital devices--laptop, tablet, smartphone, iWatch or Google Glass--to read whatever they want."
He added that the company will need to buy more books, develop better reading apps, promote the creation of online literature and work to strengthen copyright protection for both electronic and print books. The company's e-book readers will be designed "to satisfy Chinese usage habits, unlike the Amazon Kindle, which was originally designed for English readers."
Wu was a co-founder of e-literature site Qidian.com in 2002, where he promoted online novelists who were not published in traditional ways. He also let readers vote and pay for their favorite books and writers.