China: The next E-Book Central?
The spiffy machine to the left was not dreamed up in Peoria.
Where? Try China. And we’re talking about sophisticated technological development–not merely routine manufacturing.
Mainland China just could be the next E-Book Central, especially considering Washington’s less-than-full enthusiasm about national digital libraries and nonmilitary high-tech R&D in general.
Zillions of e-books in the hands of ordinary Chinese? This is more of a “why not” than “why.”
With millions of students to educate, China must worry more than the rest of the world about the costs of printed textbooks.
And given all the complexities of reproducing Chinese characters, the electronic medium will make sense.
So it’s no surprise that China’s central planners and businesses are greenlighting e-books in a big way–and that the latter are working on projects with Taiwan (long a leader in e-books and other portable technology).
The China Digital Library Project will spend the equivalent of more than $137 million dollars over five years. The National Library of China now has text, audio-visual or image versions of almost 200,000 books, according to Zhang Yanbo, the NLC’s vice director.
And it would seem very likely that many of the NLC’s items will reach Chinese homes, not just library computers. Consider the number of Chinese Net users–more than 56 million according to a study from last year. That’s just a tiny fraction of the Chinese population; imagine what happens when both e-books and the Net go mainstream in China.
Meanwhile hardware makers are gearing up.
–Many dedicated e-book devices from companies such as Taiwan’s Argosy Research, as noted this past spring in the TeleBlog, are going on sale or about to. “Using e-books in schools with local government cooperation can resolve copyright issues and create volume demand,” Argosy vice president George Wang was quoted in Global Sources. TeleRead territory for sure!
–A $99 e-book device from Argosy Research–reviewed in depth by Blackmask–is on the way. Several hundred thousand may be sold next year. The Argosy machine will be using technology from China’s CultureCom, which itself is producing the Easyread e-book reader shown at the start of this TeleBlog item.
–These machines are benefitting from the efforts of Professor Chu Bong Foo to enable the easier entry of Chinese characters into computers. In a related vein, CultureCom, his company, says a $25 chip can generate “approximately 32,000 Chinese characters in several fonts and in various sizes, using no more than 256KB of memory (as opposed to 20 to 30GB of memory needed for existing coding systems, not available in a single chip).”
–A Chinese company will use AMD chips in a Student PC webpad designed mainly with e-books in mind.
This is interesting trade-magazinish news, but the true consequences could be far greater. Remember, the e-libraries and the mushrooming number of users with advanced hardware will build on each other. Nice, well-deserved synergy. Then think about what it all means internationally. As one Chinese librarian has noted in The Development of the China Digital Library, the Chinese want to use e-libraries to share knowledge with other countries, and not just those with large Chinese populations:
Besides Chinese language, there are many other languages online…China, with its rich culture of 5000 years, is one of the largest countries in the world. We have the duty to do our best to share our information resources with the world and make the world we live in smaller and smaller.
That’s something for Washington to consider. Could it be that the Chinese will achieve greater future success in international relations by not just investing in technology but by also reaching out with it to the rest of the world?
If nothing else, the more influential the Chinese grow in e-books, the less power could be enjoyed in Asia by the American-dominated Open eBook Forum–especially if it keeps ignoring such issues as the need for a nonproprietary consumer e-book format and the elimination of DRM gouges.
Perhaps the National Institute of Standards and Technology should take more of an interest in e-books as national and international resources–and consider more than the immediate interests of Adobe, Microsoft, PalmDigital Media and Overdrive, the biggest financial supporters of the OeBF.
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