Amazon.com Launches Special Section for China Books, Maybe

Amazon.com’s big announcement today was the new family of Kindles, most especially the impressive — and cheap — Kindle Fire. But they also made another announcement. Or rather, it seems Xinhua made one for them.

Thursday morning, Xinhua (China’s official state wire service) reported:

Online shopping giant Amazon.com opened an online Chinese-language bookstore on Thursday in cooperation with a Chinese state-owned publishing group, according to a news release from Amazon.

That’s interesting, because there doesn’t seem to be a release about that on Amazon.com or Amazon.cn. Given that, we have no idea when it actually launched, but Xinhua is at least right that there is now a small section of Amazon.com dedicated specifically to books about China, especially books by Chinese authors.

Xinhua’s report makes it all sound like a bit of a bigger story than it is — it’s a small selection of a couple dozen books, some in English and some in Chinese — but it is good to see Amazon spotlighting Chinese authors and some of the few Chinese works of literature that have appeared in translation.

China apparently sees it as another small step in its soft-power push. From the Xinhua report:

The store is intended to allow readers from all over the world to have the opportunity to enjoy Chinese books, as well as improve cultural exchanges between China and other countries, according to Jon P. Fine, a senior manager at Amazon.

[…]

“China has many excellent publications suitable for the international market, but sales are restricted by limited marketing channels,” Liu Binjie, head of the GAPP, was quoted as saying in the news release.

We’re not sure whether this bookstore is really going to improve many cultural exchanges (whatever that means), but if nothing else, perhaps it will help a few more foreign readers stumble into good reads like Wolf Totem or The Complete Works of Lu Xun (assuming those foreign readers can read Chinese and have an extra $600 lying around).

Personally, I’d like to see a special section of Joyo, Amazon’s China partner, dedicated to China books in English too, but I think I’ll have to keep waiting for the time being.