One perk of owning a smartphone or a tablet computer is the chance to read your favourite book in electronic form.
But readers who want to enjoy the same Chinese-language e-book on their Android phone on the way to work and on their iPad tablet reader at home face the cost and inconvenience of having to buy the same book twice. Worse, some books are only available on one platform.
All that is about to change.
A new system will be unveiled at the city's annual book fair, which opens this month, offering an all-in-one display vehicle for Chinese-language literature, which works just as well on Apple's iOS software as on Android or Nokia's Ovi. The new e-book platform - called the Cross-Platform Sharing Reader app - will allow readers to log into any device simply by using their name and password and start reading their downloaded book.
'E-reading should not be device-specific, because the choice of device cannot decide what you read,' said Bonnie Chan Woo, founder of Handheld Culture, an e-publishing company specialising in Chinese-language books. 'Book content is all that matters to both authors and readers.'
As the popularity of e-books explodes, media coverage has focused on the electronic readers rather than reading itself, Chan said. For the novice e-reader, the new platform has a lot to offer. Pointing at a word allows you to hear how it is pronounced; tapping twice will translate it.