Chinese books and newspapers on Stanza

For those who are looking for Chinese reading material for your iPhone, there are two great resources available through Stanza (the free ePub / eReader format reader).

There is built-in library link to 书仓 (http://www.shucang.com), which in addition to e-books, has partnered with a number of Chinese magazine and newspaper publishers and has made newspapers like 《21世纪经济报导》, 《南方都市报》and 《东方早报》 available for download for free in ePub format.

There is also http://books.blah.me/index.atom which you can add as a library in Stanza. It has a more extensive selection of books by famous authors, whereas 书仓 tend to have more books by no-name Internet authors.

Also try:
http://book.zi5.me/tags/zdc/820
子乌书简

http://www.cnepub.com/index/
掌上书苑

http://www.hi-pda.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=511471
iphone stanza的中文在线书库

And as mentioned on another thread, even though Pleco on iPhone does not offer "Instant Access" that is available on the Palm and WM, you can get quasi-Instant Access by turning on the "Pasteboard Search on Startup" option under General settings. For this feature, I would also enable "Only if changed" and set "Use reader if length" to 0.

With these setting, it only takes two taps to look up in Pleco Reader a piece of text that you've copied onto the pasteboard in another program like Stanza: one tap on home button to exit your current program, another tap to start up Pleco.

See this excerpt from the manual for more details about this setting. Maybe this should be set as the default behavior.

http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/settings.html#general
Search Pasteboard on Startup

This feature allows you to automatically search the contents of your iPhone's pasteboard when Pleco opens, making it a bit faster to look up words in other applications.

Enabled: enables this feature; Pleco will insert the contents of the pasteboard into the Input Field on startup.

Only if changed: only searches for the pasteboard contents if the pasteboard has changed since the last time Pleco was run.

Use reader if length > : sets a threshold above which Pleco will look up the pasteboard contents in the Document Reader (if you've purchased it) rather than putting them in the Input Field; this way, you can quickly translate larger blocks of text (text messages, emails, etc).

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This is neat--as I don't know anything about periodicals except that 南方周末 once had a good reputation (not sure if it does anymore) and that 财经 is a good magazine but everyone has recently left--do you recommend any particular newspaper and/or periodicals?

Hey, you are pretty up-to-date on your Chinese media gossip. Hehe. Yeah, 财经 has gone down the tube since its top editors and almost all of its staff left to start a new magazine in early November.

The 《21世纪经济报导》, 《南方都市报》and 《东方早报》 carried by 书仓 are all very good. 《21世纪经济报导》and 《南方都市报》 are published by the same company that puts out 南方周末. 《21世纪经济报导》 focuses on economic and business news and comes three times week (Mon, Wed and Fri). 《南方都市报》 is a local daily for Guangzhou, but is also kind of famous for muckraking. Its top editor was imprisoned in the early 2000's after offending some higher-ups with some reporting. He's now the editor of the Chinese version of Sports Illustrated. He said it's just a job to make ends meet in an interview.

《东方早报》 is a major local daily in the Shanghai area. It probably the most in-depth reporting of all Shanghai papers and aims to be the New York Times of China in some sense. I've been reading its weekly book review supplement, which is ridiculously high-browed for a mass market paper (as if its audience were college professors).

Thanks for the info, gato!

Mike, any thoughts on supporting the ePub format, which from what I understand is simply XML?

The magazines/newspapers available on Stanza through shucang.com in ePub format include: 《南方周末》,《东方早报》,《21世纪经济报道》,《南方人物周刊》,《三联生活周刊》,《读书》,《瞭望东方周刊》.

See below:
http://www.shucang.com/journal.php?category=rf&viewtype=basic

numble - ePub support is certainly doable, yes; we'd already been planning to offer some kind of mechanism for distributing bundles of documents with manifest files, and their Open Packaging Format is better than anything we could come up with ourselves. And we already have .zip decoding built-in for that part of the ePub packaging spec. The only real problem is that ePub files are formatted as HTML, so we'd be using Live Mode here with its occasionally slower / buggier performance than reading plaintext files.

Mike,

epub support would be a great feature, especially if combined with calibre (Windows/Mac/Linux ebook library manager/reader). Calibre allows to set up a local or even global content server which then could be acessed through the Pleco Reader reader.

Would be nice if Pleco would support that format soon!

Also, RSS support would also be a cool idea.

Just some random thoughts.

Cheers,


jo

EPUB is high up on our document reader priority list, but of course as always priority needs to be balanced against difficulty and there are some other things we have to get finished first.

Hey Gato,

Just want to say thanks for the great sources! Pleco and Stanza are two of my favorite apps, and along with last.fm, are the only apps the reside on my homescreen, but I'd never thought about using the functionality in this way!

财经 really has fallen apart lately - the editor went on to become a university professor or something right? I always thought judging by some of the stories they published in the past, they must have had some pretty good 关系 somewhere, but I kind of felt like the editor was put out to pasture at the end of there. Not sure if it's a case of jumping or being pushed :-/

Anyway, thanks again for the links!

Cheers,

Ciaocibai.

You are very welcome, ciaociba. Hu Shuli (胡舒立) has taken over the editorship at 新世纪周刊, by the way, and brought most of her Caijing team with her. Their new website address is curiously similar to caijing. ;-)
http://www.caing.com/

Gosh, even the site looks similar! Funny country, this China...

Have you read through this new journal much? What is their reporting like so far? Lately I've been watching 经济半小时 which sometimes has interesting viewing, and handily provides transcripts on the website as well - which is just as well, because my listening isn't quite all there yet. Do you have any other good suggestions for Chinese viewing? Much appreciate it!

Have you read through this new journal much? What is their reporting like so far?

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I just bought an issue. It seems very similar to Caijing so far. Almost all the Caijing reporters have joined the new magazine, so that's not surprising.

So any ETA on ePub support?

numble said:

So any ETA on ePub support?

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Already implemented, so it should be in the Big Update. Bit rough at the moment - it'll render pages correctly, let you flip between chapters, bookmark / remember your place (even if you jump between pages via a hyperlink), and tap on characters to look them up, but there's not currently any support for advanced EPUB features like embedded tables of contents and glossaries; sufficient for basic rich document browsing, though.

BTW, any websites you'd recommend for sample documents? (we'd like to make sure it works OK with a wide variety of them - thus far we've only done a small assortment of test files and a few big ones like 红楼梦)

Hm, I don't personally know. A friend of mine was asking about Chinese learning/dictionary software, and asked me if he could read ePubs on Pleco.

numble said:

Hm, I don't personally know. A friend of mine was asking about Chinese learning/dictionary software, and asked me if he could read ePubs on Pleco.

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Ah. Well you can tell him that that should be possible shortly, though Calibre works pretty well in the meantime

Most book sites require registration, but this one doesn't. Should give you enough to play with. Just click on the book you want and then click on the EPUB link to download.
(redacted)
子乌书简

gato said:

Most book sites require registration, but this one doesn't. Should give you enough to play with. Just click on the book you want and then click on the EPUB link to download.

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Thanks, but since some of these books looked like they might be pirated I had to remove the link. (we'll download and test all of the public-domain ones, though)