(Chinese Version)

Many Chinese iPhone users might never open iBooks again after buying their new iPhones only to find several public domain books such as The Four Masterpieces of China in the pre-installed app iBooks.

Recently, however, Apple announced that it was bringing Apple Music, iTunes Movies, and iBooks “really” to its customers in China. Henceforth, iBooks will no longer neglected by Chinese users and really become a potent e-book store in China. (Few Chinese iPhone users bothered to open iBooks due to the terrible user experience of iTunes in China)

As a pre-installed app in billions of Apple’s devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac, etc., iBooks will outperform all other third-party e-book platforms that have at most 1 billion users and become the mostly-installed e-book store in China.

More importantly, since Apple’s users have already got accustomed to buying games and apps on Apple’s App Store, it follows that they will also be willing to buy music, movies and books on Apple's platform.

In a previous article, I mentioned that WeChat Reading app came to terms with Apple so that its users could buy e-books on its platform, on the condition that Tencent would deduct 30% of it is revenue to Apple. Kindle for IOS, however, was unwilling to make compromise. That’s why its users on Apple’s devices could only synchronize books across different devices but could never buy e-books. Many Chinese third-party e-book stores, such as Duokan and Tangcha, have also encountered such problem, among which Douban gave in and reached an agreement with Apple. In this case, iBooks will be at a huge advantage over other e-book stores on Apple’s devices, since iBooks is developed by Apple itself.

Although Apple hasn’t launched iBooks on Android and Windows’ platform, it has already been supporting synchronizing among different Apple’s products, making iBooks at a better position in the competition with others e-book stores.

For a long time, App Store has always been flooded with pirated e-books. In the past, Apple’s users could not only find official e-book stores such as QQ Reading, iReader, Doukan in App Store’s Book sector, but also various apps selling pirated e-books, such as The Complete Volume of The Lost Tomb, The Most Highly-Rated Books on Douban and Free Whole Copy Books. For example, a developer called Wuqiang Zuo even uploaded 207 apps in App Store’s Book sector, including The Complete Works of Kevin Tsai, Yuan Tengfei’s Lectures on the History of Ancient China, The Complete Volume of the Ghost Blows Out the Light, etc. However, none of these apps provides copyright information below their home pages on App Store.

In 2011, several famous Chinese writers, including Han Han, Li Chengpeng, teamed up into a League of Writers and sued Baidu Document and Apple for infringing their copyrights. One spokesperson of the league even suggested that: “Apple is a far bigger threat to Chinese writers’ copyrights than Baidu Document, and it has already brought over a billion RMB of losses to Chinese writers.”

Although the Chinese publishing industry has long been appealing to Apple, it always turned a blind eye. Now that Apple officially opened its e-book service to Chinese users, it is probable Apple will finally crack down on those e-book apps selling pirated e-books to better protect the interests of itself and of copyright owners.

The interface of iBooks looks quite similar to Kindle and WeChat Reading’s. Except for a few exclusive e-books such as Twilight and Big Head Son and Small Head Father, most e-books on iBooks are popular bestsellers. However, the number of e-books on iBooks remains limited. To stand still in the Chinese e-book market, iBooks’ developers will have to add more e-books to its store in time and further improve the reading experience of its e-books, since the typesetting and reading experience of existing e-books are still far from satisfactory, even by Apple’s own standards.

The biggest challenge for iBooks’ developer, however, remains how to attract the users of Apple’s devices to realize they can buy so large a variety of e-books in iBooks now and gradually help its users form the habit of buying e-books in iBooks, just like buying apps in App Stores. If Apple succeeds, the Chinese e-book industry will certainly benefit a great deal.

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Zhang Yuan, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.