English Reading Material For Leisure in China

As we get ready to fly, we are gathering all sorts of things we feel we will need to return to Changzhou.  One of the important things we need to take is a lot of reading material.  Of course we have access to the Internet and the reading resources of on-line newspapers and such, but I am talking about books.  Both Maureen and I have Sony eReaders thanks to our adult children who bought us these birthday presents knowing we will constantly be travelling.

Why use an eReader to read eBooks?  Well, the biggest reason is room in the baggage as well as issues of weight.  How many books would we read in a year, especially since we both have different reading interests?  We took a few dozen books the first year and ran out.  The second year we took almost three dozen books and still ran out.  So this year, we are taking about the same number of books on our eReaders.  Of course, I will still be taking a number of print books, especially language, photography and psychology resources.

We are using both Sony and Kobo for ordering eBooks.  We checked out other eBook providers and found them to be more expensive and that was enough to drop them from our list of book providers.  As well as buying books, we are able to borrow eBooks from our provincial library system.

I will admit that there is an extremely limited amount of English books available for sale in various bookstores in China.  Even Shanghai offers only a very limited selection of books.  English book titles by English authors contain, for the most part, Chinese text for the Chinese people.  With few English-speaking people in China, the market is too small to support the import or the publishing of English books.  So, if you are interested in reading while in China, you need to bring most of your reading material with you.