Cloudary Corporation, the wholly-owned Internet literature subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited, has announced a strategic investment in Byread.com, a Chinese mobile reading platform, and the two parties will implement cooperation in providing copyrighted contents in China.
According to official statistics from Cloudary, at present Cloudary has put over 10,000 books on the client of Byread.com. For the next step of the cooperation, more digital books signed by Cloudary will be provided to the mobile platform. Cloudary said that the investment will help enhance its content distribution channels. However, Cloudary did not reveal the financial details for the investment.
At the same time, Cloudary launched its latest version client for the Android platform, marking an important measure for its mobile Internet strategy. The new client for Android reportedly has three new reading models, and it also achieved improvements in its user interface, interactive experience, bookmark management, and book search. By November 7, 2011, Cloudary's client for Android had been installed and activated over 800,000 times, of which 97% are claimed to be active users.
Liu Qiang, vice president for Cloudary, said that the company has launched several versions of its mobile client for the Android and iOS operating systems, and it plans to develop similar products for Symbian and Windows Phone.
In addition, Cloudary formed partnerships with several other enterprises, including Lenovo, Zhangyue.com, 3g.cn, and Skymobi, for content cooperation.