Best Chinese Book Portals?

February 22, 2012 at 11:36 PM

What are the best websites for reading Chinese books? Here are two that seem fairly decent:

新浪读书: Sina's portal has a good selection, but sometimes it's not clear if they host the entire book or not.

腾讯读书: QQ's portal seems a bit more limited in its selection, but is pretty similar to Sina's.

What other sites would you recommend? Of course I prefer something that's free to use, has a great selection, and isn't hard to navigate. I personally prefer simplified Chinese, but I can also read traditional characters. It would also be nice if the site has a nice way of browsing its catalog by genre, author, or other criteria.

Note that this question isn't the same as my ebook question, since I'm not asking about downloadable content so much as content that I can view online.

February 23, 2012 at 12:39 AM

I've been using 努努书坊. Not sure how good it is though.

February 23, 2012 at 05:41 AM

Kanunu.org seems pretty good, although not without its share of flaws. For example, the Steve Jobs biography they list on their front page has some pretty noticeable OCR errors. Their search isn't very good (it's really just a box for running google searches). However they really seem to have a decent collection of classic fiction, mostly organized by author.

@jkhsu: Have you noticed any problems with missing pages or typos?

February 23, 2012 at 06:29 AM

Have you noticed any problems with missing pages or typos?

While I haven't noticed any missing pages, I did notice typos or OCR errors every few chapters or so. But then again, I also haven't read that much so perhaps someone else can give a better evaluation.

February 23, 2012 at 02:12 PM

Dangdang.com has a read online section - I've never used it, but I noticed they have the Jobs biography if you want to do a comparison.

February 23, 2012 at 04:33 PM

I have a friend who works at 磨铁 ( http://www.motie.com ) so I can at least vouch for them employing nice people!

The site lets you read the first chapter of each book free, then charges you to read later chapters.

A large number of their customers read the books on their mobile phones.

Much of the content is written in instalments, much as Charles Dickens wrote his books, and much of it is romantic chic-lit ... although I notice there is a 军事 section too.

February 23, 2012 at 04:47 PM

@roddy: Thanks for pointing that feature out, I've never noticed it. However, I think it's only good for previewing a book that you're thinking about buying. It looks like they sometimes post a substantial portion of the book, but the content can't be copied and pasted, which makes it a bit annoying for learners.

February 23, 2012 at 04:58 PM

Ah well. Shucang.com has been mentioned on here as well, have you seen that?

February 23, 2012 at 10:16 PM

Thanks for sharing motie.com with us, elliott50, but I'm more looking for a resource that hosts complete, previously published works.

March 12, 2012 at 03:33 AM

feihong：

http://www.eywedu.org/ is good, although the search function couldn't work.

Also you could go to www.baidu.com to search something like 围城钱钟书 txt, then you could download them and there is no copyright issue because they died more than 50 years ago so China copyright law allow people to download it, if not for profit.

March 18, 2012 at 07:18 PM

Just checked out Shucang.com for a little bit. They do seem to have a pretty decent selection, especially for genre literature. But they ask you to register before you can read anything, which is rather annoying. Their reader interface captures your mouse clicks for page turning, so you can't copy and paste any of the text. But it looks like you can actually download ebook versions of some books.

October 4, 2012 at 11:34 PM

I first saw the discussion about Chinese Ebooks, and there was a link there to this thread, with the OP stating "I'm not asking about downloadable content so much as content that I can view online".

So here are some links I collected a while ago. I had a look at the web sites and tried out some books, but haven't had a chance to use those web sites much, so I don't have many details available... (Most of them show you the text for the Chinese book without any Ebook to download, so you might want to scrape if you want to make your own Ebook.)

http://book.chaoxing.com/ (has download facility, not sure about what format)

New Threads Electronic Library [ http://www.xys.org/library.html ]

http://www.baiyun.net/

http://www.xiaoshuo.be/

http://www.shuku.net/

http://www.china-novel.com/

http://www.ibiblio.org/chinese-text/

And of course there are many many more for classical Chinese literature (if anyone is interested)...

Hope at least some of the above might be helpful.