A recent report on China's digital reading market shows that a total of 432 million Chinese people read digital publications in 2018, and over 60 percent of them would pay for reading digital materials including e-books, e-magazines and e-papers.

 

最近一项针对中国数字阅读市场的调查显示，2018年中国共有4.32亿人阅读过数字出版物，其中有超过60%的人愿意为阅读数字材料买单，包括电子书、电子杂志和电子报纸。

 

According to a white paper released by China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association, Chinese readers of all age groups actually paid more than what they'd initially¹ intended to pay, which means people are open to paying more than what they had expected to pay for digital publications that interest them.

 

The white paper also says that the overall interest to pay for digital publications among readers in China has reached 66.4 percent. The intention to pay for good e-books has become a new opportunity for traditional reading market.

 

In Western countries, some senior media giants, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Times, have all set up a subscription² system. In China, however, most of the content that the readers are interested in paying for is authoritative³ and professional media products.

 

With the value of digital reading market hitting nearly 25.5 billion yuan (about 3.6 billion US dollars) in 2018, an increasing number of traditional media outlets⁴ in China are eager to transform their business models and launch subscription systems.

 

Take People's Daily as an example, the Chinese mainstream⁵ media agency has been in the pay-reading market since July. Each of its subscribers needs to pay an annual subscription fee of 388 yuan (about 55 US dollars) to access its digital content. For other Chinese media, Caixin Media launched its payment system at the end of 2017, while Southern Weekly launched the system in August last year. China Business Network launched a similar system at the beginning of this year.

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