30% of Chinese Mobile Users to Read Newspapers on Mobile Phones in 2013
28 March 2008In five years, more than 30% of mobile phone subscribers in China will be reading books and newspapers through their phones, says a new industry report.
China’s Cultural Industry 2008 report was released last week by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Shanghai Jiaotong University. The report also forecast that 90% of Chinese newspapers would have digital editions by 2013.
News content on mobile handsets is nothing new, but it is odd to imagine such a large part of the population in China reading tiny text on a handset, especially text of something as long as a news article, let alone a full newspaper.
The US still waits for electronic readers to take a strong hold in the market, especially Amazon’s new Kindle, which offers free over-the-air wireless to download books and current editions of newspapers like the New York Times.
Amazon’s been tight-lipped about how many have actually been sold since it unveiled the Kindle in November, but potential buyers are certainly finding them tough to come by. There have been reports of shipment delays with the device.
The China Cultural Industry report said digital publications harbored enormous market potential in China. In 2007, the number of the country’s Internet users through mobile phones reached 45 million, jumping 2.26 times the previous year’s total.
Perhaps it’s not a huge leap to say that print media will move to mobile phones, especially when every other type of digital content already has. Devices like the Kindle only serve as deliverers of text, while mobile phones have effectively become video, music and Internet devices. The movement of print content to mobile handsets would be awfully convenient.
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