Three profit models for reading websites

Although Beijing scholar company is not an Internet company, Wang Donglin, chairman of the board, intends to use a big pen to prove that he is also a real "Internet old man ".
Wang Donglin plans to build the Shusheng reading Bar website (du8.com) with huge investment to set up a big flag for the Shusheng company in the Internet field. In the past two years, the UOML standard proposed by Shusheng has become the only document operation standard in the world. From then on, Shusheng has established its leading position in the core technology field of the software industry. Now, Wang Donglin apparently wants to make further progress.
"Although the scholar has never worked on the Internet, his research and development in the field of electronic books has been around for ten years. Now he is on the internet right now ." On the eve of November May, Wang Donglin spoke in an interview with The Financial Times. In his view, a new stage with huge business opportunities is slowly opening.
Fighting for the "Boku" mode
In recent years, the development momentum of domestic reading websites has become a hot topic.
Not long ago, Shanda announced an increase of 0.1 billion yuan to the start point of its wholly-owned acquisition of cmfu.com three years ago, demonstrating its extremely optimistic outlook for its website. Another literary website, hjsm.net, was earlier swallowed up by TOM. Reading websites such as longlang and hongkongtian are also becoming the target of a new round of capital pursuit.
What is different from the above websites where the original online novels are the main content is that Wang Donglin's scholar reading bar has chosen the traditional path of taking Encyclopedia e-books as its content. Historically, the "Boku network" and related websites that adopt such models have mostly ended in failures.
According to data, the Boku network was established at the end of 1999 and is headquartered in Silicon Valley, USA. Its business model is to introduce the electronic copyrights of various types of books in the publishing house and download them as electronic books for users to pay. In 2001, the website was forced to collapse. This incident caused a great sensation at that time.
In fact, the business model of the scholar's reading bar is exactly the same as that of the library. So far, all the e-books provided by this website have been officially authorized by the author or publishing institution, and have 0.25 million of the content resources of contract authors, covering various subject categories, it is increasing at a rate of thousands every month.
Such investment is undoubtedly amazing, but Wang Donglin is not worried that he will repeat the tragedy of Boku. "Time passes. The same road failed in 2000, because the number of Internet users and consumption habits at that time were not met. But now, no matter which mode of reading website can make a profit ."
According to Wang Donglin's idea, the scholar's reading bar will be made into a professional e-book reading Portal, aiming to become the largest online platform for reading, selling, and interacting e-books and electronic journals in China, build bridges for interaction and communication between authors, readers, and publishing institutions.
Wang Donglin believes that the time has come for e-books to change the traditional publishing industry. According to a piece of forecast data he quoted, in 2007, the domestic traditional book market (excluding teaching materials) was 30 billion yuan, and the electronic book market would reach 0.2 billion yuan. By 2011, the e-book market will grow to 5% of the traditional book market.
In fact, the model of the scholar's reading bar attracts the attention of the famous venture capital IDG. According to insiders, in 2006, IDG completed its strategic investment in Shusheng, with a investment amount of about tens of millions of dollars.