Reading the future(2)

Visitors at the 2015 Beijing Book Fair. [Photo by Wang Jing/China Daily]

The convergence of paper and digital publishing topped the sector's agenda.

Much attention was devoted to turning works released online into physical books.

China's most popular question-and-answer social-network website, Zhihu.com, published its second book, Jin Qian You Shu (Money Has Its Way), in partnership with China Citic Press. Its first book on starting businesses proved successful last year.

The new book is a compilation of 15 authors' answers to questions about finance and money management that received nearly a million "likes" on the website.

Its subtitle reads: An Elective Finance Course with 987,433 Likes.

Zhihu claims the content was selected from answers to more than 300,000 questions posted by 12 million registered users, who include entrepreneurs and intellectuals.

Questions about finance became hot topics on Zhihu over the past year because of the surge of online fund-management platforms and the stock market's recovery.

"We created this book by screening to determine the best content," says Cheng Yuan, who co-founded the website in 2011.

The book has already sold 100,000 copies since presale online orders began two months ago.

China Citic Press has also published the Rumor Grinder book series to counter widespread misunderstandings about science in partnership with popular-science website Guokr.com and The First Day to Earth with Elephant Association, a new media account on the instant-messaging platform WeChat that publishes articles about trivia.

Fledgling crowdfunding website Zhongchou.cn and publishing social network Zan Shang Books both encourage professionals to publish their books via advances paid by fans.

More than 88,000 readers attended the Beijing Book Fair. And 864 publishers sealed contracts with libraries nationwide worth 85 million yuan ($29 million), calculated according to cover prices.

Overall, 2015 is looking to be a good year for publishers.

Beijing-based research company Open Book says in its 2014 report that China's book-retail market has grown 10 percent year-on-year. That includes a 3.4 percent increase of offline sales, ending the decline that began in 2012.

So, it seems the paper-book tradition isn't－at least currently－struggling in China's digital age.

Instead, new technologies are producing innovative converges of old-fashioned and newfangled publishing that are helping physical books to thrive as 2015 begins.

As for the years to come－well, that's another story, one yet unwritten.