Beijing's overcrowded subways and buses don't make it easy for commuters to turn pages of books or newspapers. But that doesn't mean they're not reading. On the contrary, it's becoming common in the capital to see commuters access reading material on mobile phones, PDAs and, increasingly, specialist handsets, as more and more people take to downloading e-books.
It would be an irony if China - where the uses of paper were discovered almost 2,000 years ago - became the country that ends the dominance of printed books. Yet the mainland is at the forefront of an e-book revolution that threatens ultimately to make print books as archaic as vinyl records.
'I think e-books will take the place of printed books, just as the paper book took the place of books written on bamboo,' says Li Bo, vice-president of Changjiang Literature and Arts Publishing House. 'There'll still be a market for print books, but only for collectors or for decoration in people's homes. They won't be for reading.'
Although the US is the biggest e-book market in financial terms, China leads the world in numbers of readers. Last year people reading e-books rose to an estimated 79 million - a 34 per cent increase on 2007. Crucially, almost half of those readers are under the age of 25.
'It's a very convenient way to read,' says Zhang Fudong, a 23-year-old administrator at a Beijing fitness club who has now stopped buying print books. 'I can read e-books everywhere, on the bus or even in the office during boring meetings.'
Like many younger people, Zhang's preferred reading is fantasy novels, especially wuxia sagas by writers such as Huang Yi.
