A few days ago, the “2016 digital reading White Paper” released at the third China digital reading conference showed that in 2016, the number of digital reading users in China had exceeded 0.3 billion, and the market size had reached about 12 billion yuan, the growth rate reached 25%.
At the same time, the results of the 14th National Reading Survey show that the digital reading rate of adult citizens in China increased significantly last year, and the comprehensive reading rate of various media was 79.9%, slightly higher than 79.6% in 2015; the contact rate of digital reading was 68.2 percent, up 4.2 percent age points from 64.0 percent in 2015.
Digital reading has become the “new favorite” in the Internet era, but the hidden worries are becoming increasingly prominent: the proliferation of low-quality texts impacts readers’ spiritual defense line and moral bottom line; The fragmentation of reading forms, it prevents people from forming a complete knowledge system; Piracy and plagiarism are popular, and the legitimate rights and interests of authors cannot be effectively protected. Regulatory authorities and content providers need to work together to create a clear living and development space for digital reading.
Sexual violence
Low quality content extensive growth
Opening the web page of an online novel, pornographic, violent and other bad content is full of eyeballs. Even if the platform has a keyword review mechanism, it is still “exploited” by the author through delimiters, pinyin substitution and other tricks “.
The trend of digital reading is overwhelming, but the low-quality chaos of text cannot be ignored, which has become a hidden danger restricting the healthy development of the industry. Some websites pay too much attention to the commercial value behind digital reading, “take the eye” by any means, and even play the “edge ball” of the law to provide users with obscene and vulgar content.
From last January to June, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the Office of the National Working Group on “eliminating pornography and eliminating non-corruption” carried out rectification actions to comprehensively clean up vulgar content published on the Internet, including network novels, 1414 kinds of pornographic and vulgar online literature including cell phone novel were investigated and dealt with, 20 websites that spread pornographic literature were closed, and more than 30000 Web links of various pornographic literature were deleted.
A Web writer revealed that some digital reading platforms required signing writers to increase from 2,000 words to 10000 words per day in order to gain clicks. With such a large workload, the author can only take the number of words as the main purpose, which leads to bizarre plots and lengthy delays, making it difficult to ensure the quality of the content.
“China’s digital reading is still in the extensive development stage, lacking creative product and service awareness, and the overall level needs to be improved.” According to Yang Qingxiang, an associate professor at the School of Literature of Renmin University of China, the era of digital reading still needs to guide the public to read healthily through standardized management.
Open the “triple reading” mobile APP, you can see the cover story, subscription column, news, a week of popular articles and other columns, gathering the works of columnist, opinion leader and knowledge celebrity. This is the digital reading platform of Sanlian Life Weekly magazine built on the mobile phone. Users leave messages, “the quality of articles is very high, the experience is good, and it is worth paying”.
“The ideal digital reading environment should be timely, convenient and interactive, while ensuring the depth of thinking.” Yang Qingxiang said that digital reading is not equal to low quality or even vulgar. Whether in the paper age or the screen reading age, high-quality content is the basic premise of high-quality reading.
Pan Junxiong, vice president of China Publishing Group, said: “No matter how innovative the reading carrier is, content providers should always follow the principle that content is king and do quality cultural communication.”
Fast and shallow reading becomes mainstream
How to present classic fragments
“I am busy at ordinary times, so I can only read mobile phone articles on the subway to and from work. Sometimes when there are too many words, I can’t read them calmly, so I simply skip them.” A netizen described his mobile reading experience in this way.
According to the research report previously released by the reading group, which operates the well-known network literature platform, young people under 26 are the “main force” for digital reading through mobile terminals “. The reason why we choose this way of reading is that “what young people fight for IS speed”.
Experts pointed out that this kind of fragmented reading, which is quickly enjoyed, browsed and finally abandoned, splits the logic and continuity of people’s thinking about problems, and it is not easy to form a deep and systematic knowledge system, it may even make people lose the ability to read long articles.
A teacher majoring in literature in Duke University in the United States found in teaching research that some professional researchers in the field of modern western novels in colleges and universities could not even read through the classics of “Remembrance of Things Past” and “Ulysses; however, not long ago, the survey results on students’ reading in three colleges and universities in Xi’an showed that only less than 30% of the students had basically read four famous books completely through paper books.
A junior student said in an interview: “The more serious the reading, the more paper books should be chosen, because reading paper books is easy for people to concentrate. However, electronic terminals such as iPad have too many functions, which are easily distracted during reading and are not suitable for reading large classic works.”
As a brand-new reading method born in the Internet era, the mission and function carried by digital reading should not change. Content providers need to think about how to provide valuable and nutritious content to readers in a fragmented way so as to adapt to the pace of the Internet era. For example, if a novel is divided into several parts, although it is presented to readers in the form of “Fragments”, it can finally achieve the goal of effective reading. At present, digital reading terminals such as Kindle and Zhihu have begun to focus on providing systematic and in-depth books for people.
“Digital reading is not completely equal to fragmented shallow reading paintings, and this reading form is also suitable for classic content”, Sun Shu, director of digital publishing center of Commercial Press. In addition to providing high-quality texts, digital publishing will also transfer its position to value-added services such as audio and video in the future.
Writing artifact
Copyright protection needs to keep up
In April this year, a website was investigated and punished to provide more than 2,200 infringing novels to the public without the permission of the obligee, and illegally earned more than 270000 yuan through advertising.
Digital reading has broad prospects. However, infringement phenomena such as reprinting without permission and reprinting without payment have always been “roadblocks” hindering its healthy development and need to be rectified urgently.
Li Junhui, contract research fellow of the Intellectual Property Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, said that according to Article 10 of the copyright law, the act of reprinting without permission was suspected of infringing the right of reproduction of the author of the original work, broadcasting rights or information network transmission rights. The act of reprinting without payment is suspected of infringing the right to obtain remuneration of the author of the original work.
In addition, plagiarism works formed by “copying and pasting” and pinching their heads and tails are also rampant on major digital reading platforms. The original work of a hit play was compared by hundreds of netizens, and it was found that the work was suspected of copying more than 200 novels, and even some details were copied directly without changing one word.
The reporter searched for “writing software” on Taobao and found that as long as it costs tens to hundreds of yuan, he can buy a “writing artifact” and extract paragraphs from existing works, combine into a new novel. However, the fact that it is difficult to prove and the success rate is low makes the original author’s road to safeguarding rights very bumpy.
In last September, more than 30 units including palm reading technology and reading group established the “China network literature Copyright Alliance” and issued the “self-discipline convention of China network literature Copyright Alliance”. It is pointed out that alliance members should adhere to the principle of “authorization before use”, respect the legal rights of copyright owners of online literature, and resist infringement and piracy.
Relevant State departments have also continuously issued and improved relevant regulations, such as “regulations on the protection of information network transmission rights” and “China Internet Network Copyright self-discipline Convention”, etc, protect the legal rights of network writers from the system level. A few days ago, Zhou Mei Sen, a Chinese online co-writer, released an anti-piracy statement in the name of the people and reported the related piracy to the National Copyright authority, report to the public security organ for acts suspected of constituting the crime of infringing copy right.
Li Junhui suggested: “In the future, relevant departments should Plus-sized investigate and crack down on unauthorized online reprinting, especially give full play to technical means to quickly identify and lock unauthorized reprinting and release, timely interrupt the connection or access, and urge pirated websites and infringement owners to compensate. At the same time, publishers also need to establish a protection mechanism for original content to encourage netizens to actively report infringement and plagiarism, so as to standardize the industrial order of digital publishing.”
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A few days ago, the “2016 digital reading White Paper” released at the third China digital reading conference showed that in 2016, the number of digital reading users in China had exceeded 0.3 billion, and the market size had reached about 12 billion yuan, the growth rate reached 25%.