China continued to see a rise in the digital reading sector amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as the number of e-book consumers hit 494 million with a year-on-year growth of 5.56 percent, an industry report said on Friday.

Meanwhile, the value of the digital reading market reached 35.2 billion yuan ($5.4 billion) in the country, up 21.8 percent than the previous year, according to the report released at the seventh China Digital Reading Conference in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

According to the report, an increasing number of Chinese people are getting used to digital reading, and more are willing to pay for quality content. Among over 20,000 people surveyed, per respondent read 9.1 e-books and 6.3 audiobooks on average, both seeing a rise of around five percent. However, the per capita reading for paper books stood at 6.2 publications, dropping 2.6 books from the previous year.

People of different age groups showed distinctive reading preferences. As the report indicates, people born before the 1970s preferred health and fitness books and the post-70s liked reading books on military and warfare. Fashion books appealed to the post-80s, travel books to the post-90s, while the post-95s preferred comic books.

In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak and the commercialization of 5G have accelerated the transformation of reading from digitalization to intelligentization. New technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality, have expanded the coverage of digital reading in cloud libraries and cloud bookstores. Cloud services and the Internet of Things in the field of digital reading have also entered the fast track of development, according to the report.

(With input from Xinhua)