Shanghai

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"

Chinese readers increasingly prefer foreign books in English rather than their translated Chinese versions, boosting sales of English language books in China. The growing popularity of English books in China was described as a "surge" by Zhao Wei, publisher at an international publishing house based in Beijing. Zhao was once manager of the China division of Random House, the largest general-interest book publisher in the world. Zhao said her publishing house witnessed a double in sales volume in China, declining to reveal the exact number.

China has a huge publishing industry, with over 367,000 titles published in 2011 — making it a large and lucrative market for foreign publishers who want to sell book rights there. But they may face unique challenges, including an ebook market very different from the one in the West.

“Times are hard,” Diane Spivey, rights and contracts director at Hachette’s Little, Brown in the UK, acknowledged in her introduction at Tuesday afternoon’s 26th annual International Rights Directors Meeting at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta, a publication that has existed in English since the Victorian era, will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself “the magazine of new writing” don’t stop there.

“In five years I could see us with 15 or 17 foreign editions,” John Freeman, the editor of Granta, said in an interview in New York this summer.

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc., whose skill at hyping new products helped make it the world’s most valuable technology company, became a victim of its own success after a botched introduction of its iPhone 4S in China led it to suspend sales. Would-be customers who waited overnight as temperatures dropped below minus 9 degrees Celsius reacted with fury after the company’s main store in Beijing’s Sanlitun district failed to open. The company sold out of the handsets at stores that did open and later halted sales of all iPhones at its five retail outlets in the country “for

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