Between sustaining and disruptive innovation : China’s digital publishing industry in the age of mobile Internet

Among China’s cultural and creative industries digital publishing has the potential to change the boundaries that have previously constrained reading publics in China. Most of these boundaries are administrative, intended to channel the Chinese reading public into state approved formats and genres. Digital publishing, and more recently mobile Internet reading practices, are challenging institutional arrangements and generating disruptive technological innovations, not only in respect to publishing business models, but also administration, censorship, and reading cultures. In changing the game rules of connecting readers, content, and publishers, they broaden the scope of genres, and in doing so provide seeds of digital activism. In this chapter I review the development of China’s digital publishing industry. I explore economic and cultural changes brought about by mobile reading as well as its role in the development of new reading cultures in China. In the first section I look at problems facing publishing more broadly before turning to the rise of digital publishing, the mobile Internet and the various industry players. Following this I examine the digital disruption in China’s mobile Internet publishing industry and the digital activism of emerging reading publics. Yet, while there is cause for optimism, there is uncertainty about the extent to which disruptive technologies can transform established publishing models and how the relations between digital publishing, reading publics and digital activism will play out. Uncertainty exists especially when the core consumer market of mobile publishing is the diaosi, a demographic sometimes referred to a ‘lost generation’.