Page 60 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

On a second sweep of the frenetic store, I fully grasp how far removed I
am from Borders and Barnes & Noble. Although the store is overloaded,
appearances are deceptive. Textbooks and English-language instruction books
account for half the volumes.
China is opening up to books and their power to educate young and old
alike and thus transform society, but shopping for books can be a chaotic and
tiresome experience. After another half hour of bumping into people and
jostling past cashier lines, I head outside into the glaring noonday sun to catch
my breath.
My brief tour shows why buying books online is catching on in the
world’s fastest-growing book market. Although China invented movable type
hundreds of years ago, the Chinese looked to Seattle for a more modern inno-
vation in publishing: online sales. In the northwestern reaches of the United
States, the American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos popularized bookselling over the
Internet with a start-up called Amazon.com. From its humble beginnings in
1994 as a small online book retailer run from a garage, Amazon.com grew
into a $10.7 billion empire.
The Chinese were quick to copy Amazon.com. In 1999, five years after
Amazon’s founding, dozens of knockoffs sprang up in China. That was also
the year Bezos was named Man of the Year by Time magazine for making
e-commerce the convenient way to shop for books and other merchandise.
But in China Bezos has flubbed his chance to be the king of online book-
selling, at least so far. Even though China is Amazon’s fastest-growing market,
with almost half of its overall revenues coming from international sales, the
number one online bookseller in China is a Beijing-based online company
called Dangdang.com. Dangdang has nearly 13 million registered users or cus-
tomers on its site, trailed closely by
onetime market leader Amazon’s
“The winner will be the one who lasts longer.” Joyo at 11 million. On a recent trip

Tangos Chan, to China, Bezos declared that Ama-
publisher, China Web 2.0 Review zon will increase its investment in
Joyo and make it “the very best in
the world at serving customers.”
Which company will emerge as
the clear winner in the long term is debatable. The rivals have been jockeying
for market leadership for several years. Neither one is currently profitable.

34 SILICON DRAGON