Introduction and Method

Introduction

       Reading habits change a lot in China recently. More and more people start to use cellphone reading books instead of holding actual books. Even for people older than forty-five who cannot adapt modern technology as easy as young people, they still learn and get use to reading books on smart phone. This habit changing affect many groups of people because since almost everyone has smartphones now, they don’t like to read paper books anymore. It means magazines, newspapers and especially publishing novels are facing a severe financial problem. While modern people have more and more pressure in their daily life, they do not like reading literatures anymore because most of the great pieces are tragedy. People intend to read some online novels to relaxing themselves. And because online novels are cheaper, easier to find, having more amount of storage and more convenience to read anywhere on smartphones. Writers don’t want to publish their books after they finish the whole book, either. As far as I know, only China has such a big change in recent years. By investigation how people usually reading books can let other countries’ people know another possibility to develop their reading and writing ecosystem in the future.

       Before starting doing the research, it is important to define “online novels”. Online novels are novels that have been uploaded to the website. Writers who write online novels must upload new chapters every day until they finish the whole book. By uploading new chapters, they can earn moneys every day because readers have to pay for each chapter after free trail readings (a dollar can buy seventy chapters). There are many famous websites in China, running over twenty years. Categories in those websites are clear and various. In research “Gender differences in the online reading environment” written by Ziming Liu and Xiaobin Huang (2008), male readers and female readers have different preferences when they choose books (616). And because different genders also have different taste in story type, novel websites designed gender categories as well. Therefore, this research can help writers knowing how to earn the most of readers among general public.

Methods

Participants: People how will do this survey are random people through a wide age range in both genders. The online survey is open to anyone and share to the social-media so more people can see and help to do the research. The total numbers of people will be at least fifty and no more than a hundred.

Procedure: This survey is totally anonymous. Through the survey, they have six questions to answer. First, they need to say their gender and age (two questions). Then, they are going to answer, “Do you prefer digital or printed books?” There are three choices provided: digital, printed and both. The next question is an open question: How much do you spend on reading online every month? They can write down the average costs and I will category the numbers in different sections based on the result. The fifth question is “where you usually find books”. Novel websites, Wechat, Kindle and others would be four options they have. The final question is “what genres you are prefer to read”. People can choose more than one answers in this question and no more than five. Ten different popular genres will be listed and people can write down the genre I did not list in survey.