"It's not an idea that came in a flash," said Zheng Hao, head of the Digital Publishing Department at New World Press. "Since so many readers prefer to spend their reading time on digital media, there's no reason for us not to pursue digital publishing."

Everyone's an author

"Want to have your book published? Join the NWP.CN," says an advertising banner on the platform's website. All that aspiring writers need to do is to sign up on NWP.CN and publish their stories in serial form. If their work can attract a large group of readers, the press will buy the digital copyrights and distribute the books to different online reading platforms, where people pay to read it on their iPad or mobile devices.

This is how Ren Ran, a school teacher and writing enthusiast, had her first book digitally published and won her first fans. For the past two years, NWP.CN has helped hundreds of people, like Ren, realize their writing dreams. 

"In the past, once the book was refused by the press, there was no way to have it read by others, but digital publishing helped lower the threshold of publication and provided more opportunities for the general public to read and write," Zheng said.

China's web literature boom dates back to 1998 when a young man named Cai Zhiheng rose to fame when his novel,The First Intimacy, was published on the Internet. His success marked the beginning of the e-book business inChina. Many companies began to invest in self-publishing websites, where readers paid for popular authors' latest installments. Among those, Shanda Literature has achieved spectacular success. It now owns five literature websites and holds the copyrights to over 3 million digital books.

But Zheng believes that in this changing world of publishing, there must still be some role for traditional publishing houses. Some web authors can produce as many as 6,000 to 10,000 characters per day; in that case, most self-publishing websites cannot keep the quality of such a vast amount of information to a satisfactory level.

According to him, at New World Press, works published as e-books and paperbacks go through the same editing process. "Many authors trust traditional press more than others for its professionalism and reputation. I think that's our advantage against our powerful competitors," Zheng said.

"In the digital context, everyone could be an author, but not everyone is qualified as a writer whose works can be shelved in book stores," said Ren, who plans to stick by her dream of becoming a popular author.

"Maybe one day I can publish my print work. It's a dream for all the web authors," Ren said.

On the road

China's digital publishing industry had an annual output of 193.5 billion yuan ($31.2 billion) in 2012, an increase of 40 percent. The surge in revenue was mostly generated by online ads and mobile games; e-books and newspapers accounted for only 2 percent. But it seems likely that this 2 percent is bound to determine the future of the entire publishing industry.

"The publishing industry is like a pacified lake, and digital publishing is tossed into it as a stone, it fell [first] into the American market but [spread] ripples fast and wide," commented Chen Zhiyu, who represents a digital publishing company.

The leading online book retailer Amazon reported that its sales proportion of e-books to print books was 105:100 in 2012. Maybe it's time for traditional publishers to embrace digital publishing, but in Chinese publishing circles a realistic question is: what's the new profit model for the press in the digital context?

In 2007, Amazon.com launched its e-book reader, Kindle, and achieved unprecedented success. Shanda Literature soon followed the example and launched a related product called a Bambook inChina, which enables users to download e-books from Shanda's online bookstore. Many additional presses see a light from the new mode but are stopped by the extremely high cost of research, production and copyright purchase.

Some Chinese companies often look for a short-cut to success by following models set by the West, but it's never a perfect fit, especially in the cultural industry. One area that must be addressed in the Chinese context is piracy, which has long plagued the country. The situation could become especially bad for digital books, which are harder to oversee and protect from copyright infringement. If piracy does occur, it will hurt domestic e-book providers, as well as become an impediment for Amazon's expansion intoChina. 

"In this time, there's no example to follow, and we have to figure it out by ourselves," Zheng said. "All we can do now is to focus on what we can and are good at." So far, New World Press has digitalized all of its books and keeps hunting for new talents. It's also expanding into additional fields by planning to digitalize its educational resources and develop its mobile applications. Alongside the New World Press are more than 500 Chinese publishers trying to find a new growth point in the digital era.

The General Administration of Press and Publication, Radio, Film and Television, an agency in charge of China's press and publication industry, has highlighted in its development plan that digital publishing output should account for 25 percent of the whole publishing industry by the end of the country's 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-15). It also encourages the traditional press to further explore the area.