Beijing

QR Codes Link Subway Riders to Library eBooks (iQR.me) Naysayers of the efficiency of QR codes always make the excuse that the popularity in Asia is due to their love of mobile devices and new technology. And that’s a problem? How can over a billion users be wrong? Well the latest QR code ‘fad’ is […]

The post Morning Links: Library e-books and QR codes on Beijing subway. Kobo wooing indie U.S. bookstores in new ways. appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

A month after announcing its partnership with Shanghai-based Tencent Literature, Boston-based distribution and e-book-discovery start-up Trajectory Inc. has opened a suite of additional agreements pertaining to a new relationship with the major Chinese corporation Xiaomi.

The new deals include Macmillan, MIT Press, and UK wholesale distributor Gardners Books.

Trajectory is positioning itself as a bridge to such major Chinese retailers as Tencent and Xiaomi, for publishers in the West to use in getting their books into China's marketplace. A key to Trajectory's operation in this role is its Natural Language Processing Engine

On the subway in Beijing, as in most cities with underground Wi-Fi connections, commuters usually spend their rides mindlessly staring at their phones, scrolling through emails or playing games. But now riders on one metro line have another option: With a scan of a QR code inside the train car, they can access a library of free e-books.

The books are curated by the National Library of China (NLC), which hopes to help make people more likely to read in everyday life. Working with subway operator Beijing MTR, the library launched the new "M Subway Library"

Although “Hard Choices” by Hillary Clinton has been published already in a Chinese translation in the free and democratic nation of Taiwan, complete with front page newspaper coverage, communist Chinese publishers in Beijing have nixed publishing the account of Clinton’s four years as U.S. secretary of state. No English edition will be available in China. […]

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Beijing has tightened controls on book publishers and ordered publications by authors from Hong Kong and Taiwan to go through a stricter approval process.

The directive was sent to all chief editors of major Chinese publishers in early December and came with immediate effect.

The move was to weed out content deemed "vulgar" or "politically harmful" by the authorities, sources familiar with the situation said. The tightening was never publicised.

BEIJING - Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel's sprawling biographyof China's reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition. The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest.