Best Source for Chinese Ebooks?

[feihong]

I noticed that I forgot to follow up on my experiences with Shucang.com. I think it's just an OK resource for ebooks. Their selection is pretty huge but their download restrictions are a bit onerous and the ebooks I got from there contained a LOT of errors (although they were still readable).

So for the time being, I'm scraping pages from book.kanunu.org and assembling the ebooks myself into ZIP and MOBI formats.

[gougou]

I've had good experiences with coay.com.

They have a decent selection (at least I have been finding most of what I was looking for), and what I've seen so far was both complete and low on (though not free of) errors. I think you need to register to download, but after that there don't seem to be any further restrictions.

[kittyw]

if you can read traditional chinese, try http://www.haodoo.net They do not have many books but the quality of the books is very high and you can download everything free of charge and in different file formats. I use my kindle paperwhite to read them and they are really extremely good!

[roddy]

This is worth a look - they have an iPhone / iPad app and you can buy stuff by in-app purchase. I can't see that you can transfer anything to a Kindle or other format, but haven't looked hard.

[imron]

For the next 3 days (April 17-19), all ebooks on Dangdang are apparently free. You're limited to 10 titles per user per day, but still seems like quite a good deal!

Haven't actually downloaded any myself, so it'd be interesting to hear other people's experience with this.

[roddy]

As far as I can see (I'm not going to hunt it down) you can't download them as such, it's read it in your browser or their desktop or mobile app. Free is my favourite price, but if it's not on Kindle I'm unlikely to use it.

Still, easy enough to find and get the books, so worth doing.

[Meng Lelan]

>>This is worth a look - they have an iPhone / iPad app and you can buy stuff by in-app purchase. >>

Interesting. I would like to read books in Chinese on my iPhone. Does "stuff" refer to various book titles to buy?

[roddy]

Would I have posted this in the ebook topic if it sold pictures of kittens

Yes. they sell books and magazines. I haven't looked at the range in detail, and it doesn't look very extensive, but they do have things you might want to read.

[samitakamaki]

I tried it, it is very easy if you already got a Dangdang account. They will add the book to a digital bookshelf within your account, and you get the options of reading the file on-line in your browser, or download it to your iPad/iPhone or Android apps. So no options of downloading a pdf or epub directly (although there must surely be ways if you are tech-savvy enough).

The books seems to be of high quality (with indexed chapter headings for example), albeit in a format that doesn't allow restructuring the text in any way (e.g. changing fonts, font size, layout, flow) which leads me to believe these are OCRed pdf-scans. Reading in the browser is quite cumbersome, and the handheld versions must be even worse, if they are as inflexible.

As others have pointed out, the selection is quite lackluster, I haven't really found anything I'd like to read, even though I searched for many of the novels previously recommended here (feel free to post links to worthwhile finds folks).

[roddy]

I dread to think how far behind I am on this, but Amazon.cn now has a Kindle book store. Got to be useful, no?

[lechuan]

Very useful indeed. Residents of China, Macau, Hong Kong, USA, Canada, Thailand, and Taiwan can buy Kindle books from amazon.cn. If you already have a registered Kindle account on another amazon.x site, make sure to sign up with a different email address, or else Kindle purchases won't work on amazon.cn. You also have to go into the Kindle settings (on amazon.cn) and set up your Country/Address. Unfortunately, the Kindle app can only log onto one account at a time.

Don't recommend faking your address to get around country restrictions. it's risky: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account

[Allen Zhang]

I reccommend a website: http://share.chaoxing.com/超星共享资料.

You should create an account first, then you can download books or materials.

[roddy]

FWIW, I bought an ebook off Dangdang yesterday and it was pretty painless to pay with a foreign Visa card. Had to wait overnight for it to register the payment - came off the card right away, but registered as 等待到款 or something for several hours. 

 

I still want to investigate using Amazon.cn and getting stuff onto my Kindle, but only Dangdang had an electronic version of this book. Unfortunately the only e-ink option for Dangdang appears to be this, Dangdang's own device. Anyone got one?

 

Any ideas for getting a book bought off Dangdang onto Kindle? I suspect it can't be done, bar maybe trying to use the online reading function via the browser. Can't imagine that'd be very much fun though. 

[ouyangjun]

 

 

I still want to investigate using Amazon.cn and getting stuff onto my Kindle, but only Dangdang had an electronic version of this book. Unfortunately the only e-ink option for Dangdang appears to be this, Dangdang's own device. Anyone got one?

 

Just yesterday I picked up a Kindle to link it to the Amazon.cn Kindle store.  From what I can see so far pretty good.  Lot's of stuff on there, but not everything (yet).  The prices are really cheap with lots of free books and on average the paid books range from 1RMB to 15 RMB.  Most books can be downloaded for free as a sample, which gives you maybe the first 25 pages.  I like this feature, because it can give me a feel if I want to buy the book and commit to it, or move on.

 

I also looked into dangdang, but Amazon seemed a heck of a lot easier.

 

(note that my Amazon.cn account is registered to a China address with a Chinese credit card... not sure how/if this works overseas with a foreign credit card)

[roddy]

I think as I understand it (for another post on here, I suspect) you can't have one kindle linked to both Amazon.cn and Amazon.something else? That means I'd have to get another kindle, as I'm a pretty constant user and I wouldn't want to be re-registering back and forth if I can help it. But I'm also loath to have yet another device. So that's put me off so far. I might have looked into it this time round, but Amazon.cn didn't have the right book. 

 

It'd be a fantastic set up though. Even the sample chapters would offer a pretty infinite range of reading material. 

[icebear]

Roddy, have you considered installing 多看 OS on your Kindle and just restarting when moving to Chinese (rather than switching to another device)? Items purchased in Duokan on iOS or other platforms will sync to the Paperwhite on next log in. I don't read many books, so I don't use it much at all these days, but my experiment with it made it seem like a decent option.

One perk - all highlights from Duokan can be synced to Evernote for easy exporting.

[ouyangjun]

 

 

I think as I understand it (for another post on here, I suspect) you can't have one kindle linked to both Amazon.cn and Amazon.something else? That means I'd have to get another kindle, as I'm a pretty constant user and I wouldn't want to be re-registering back and forth if I can help it. But I'm also loath to have yet another device. So that's put me off so far. I might have looked into it this time round, but Amazon.cn didn't have the right book. 

 

Roddy, you're right about that.  That is the reason why it took me so long to link to the Amazon.cn account.  I also do a fair bit of reading from the US Amazon store, so I ended doing exactly what you said above.... I bought a second Kindle.  So I have two Kindles, one linked to the US store one linked to the China store.  Just the idea of having two Kindles make my stomach turn, it seemed like an extreme measure.  At the end of the day I did it and am happy with the decision.  

 

Side note... Everything I quote someone's text my quotation box has a huge space at the top.  Am I doing something wrong?  I'm using both Mac OSX and Windows 8 (from my personal and work computer) both have the same issue.  Seems like a user issue....

[roddy]

I really can't be bothered with installing Duokan and so on. The Kindle isn't a quick restart, and a lot of the time I'm just looking to read for ten minutes on the bus. 

 

I'm actually thinking I might just stick with reading on my phone - I can set the Kindle app up for reading Amazon.cn stuff (is there a separate app for .cn, or is it the same one?) and already have the Dangdang one. 

 

What's book availability like across the two platforms? I was looking for 跑步穿过中关村 and only found it on Dangdang. This is why I'm thinking I won't bother getting another Kindle, there's no point if sometimes stuff is only going to be on Dangdang. And I'm not getting Dangdang's reader. 

[ouyangjun]

 

 

I'm actually thinking I might just stick with reading on my phone - I can set the Kindle app up for reading Amazon.cn stuff (is there a separate app for .cn, or is it the same one?) and already have the Dangdang one. 

 

I believe the app is the same all around.  Just need to link your account.  At least that's how it was last year. 

[icebear]

Fully understood regarding convenience Roddy.

A (free) service that I've been using may be of interest: http://www.hikindle.com

It will send a daily digest of articles from domestic and international media (e.g. BBC 中文版). The nicest parts of the service (for me):

1) fully automated - I setup once and from then on just read the daily sync

2) Chinese formatted - ensuring my installed c-e dictionary is used. Instapaper fails - using a English metadata tag which forces only useless e-e lookups

3) sent in periodical format, which makes browsing/skipping articles very easy

The service also can be upgrading, significantly widening the scope of content that can be added to the digests (mostly weekly magazines). Among those are at least one digest of 小说. At cny50 a year it's very reasonable - I may subscribe in the near future if time permits that much reading.