Jingdong launches paid e-book download service

　　Jingdong launches paid e-book download serviceBy Zhang He (People's Daily)14:50, February 23, 2012 Edited and translated by People's Daily Online

　　Chinese online retailer Jingdong Mall announced on Tuesday the launch of its e-books paid download service - Jingdong Mall E-Books.

　　More than 80,000 varieties of electronic books and magazines are available online in the first phase, categorized into e-books, digital journals, multimedia e-books, and so on. Number of partner suppliers of the channel reached above 200, according to news from Jingdong Mall.

　　This move makes Jingdong Mall become the largest supplier of e-books paid download service in China. Jingdong Mall estimated that the varieties of e-books available online can reach up to 300,000 by the end of this year.

　　Liu Qiangdong, founder and CEO of Jingdong Mall, said that the e-books service of Jingdong Mall is different from what their industry peers Amazon and Dangdang had launched previously, because Jingdong Mall adopted an "all platform" strategy in its e-books services, restricting the business scope on operating the platform without engaging hardware, so as to establish a cooperative rather than competitive relationship with e-books hardware manufacturers like Hanvon and Shanda, and mobile phone manufacturers, and form a healthy industrial chain of publication and distribution of e-books. Thus, Jingdong Mall gained the unanimous support of the upstream and downstream partners.

　　In addition, Jingdong Mall also announced that it will launch digital music services in the second half of this year during the news conference held in Beijing.