Almost 70 percent of Chinese people now read on digital platforms amid a surge in the popularity of smartphones in the country, new official survey results have shown.
The proportion of Chinese readers using devices like phones and e-readers has been on the rise for eight consecutive years and stood at 68.2 percent in 2016, according to annual research by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication.
Digital readership has kept growing while Chinese people have been spending more time looking at screens.
The survey, of 22,415 people across the age spectrum from 52 cities in 28 provinces, found that adults spent a daily average of 74.4 minutes reading digital content on their phones in 2016, an increase of 12.19 minutes over the previous year.
“While people spent over an hour reading on phones in the past year, fewer people used electric reading devices like Kindles. We see a tendency that smartphones may take over the whole digital readership,” Wei Yushan, head of the Academy of Press and Publication, told China Economic Net.
The average daily reading time spent on China’s major instant messaging application WeChat reached 26 minutes, taking up 35 percent of the average reading time on phones.
With the prevalence of digital reading, more and more people are willing to pay for digital content. In 2016, the survey respondents spent an average of 16.95 yuan (2.46 US dollars) on paid content online, a total increase of 3 billion yuan over the past year.
The survey was published in time for World Book and Copyright Day on April 23. The annual event has been organized by UNESCO since 1995 to promote reading, publishing and copyright protection.
