As reported in the article "How much should ebooks cost in China?", the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication (CAPP) recently released findings of its ninth annual survey on the Chinese people's reading habits. According to the findings, there is an evident increase in the popularity of ebooks among Chinese readers between the ages of 18 and 70. However, 75.3 percent of those surveyed said they still like to hold and read paper books.

This prompts one to find out how much paper books cost in China. Specifically, what is the difference between the average price of locally written Chinese books and that of translated Western books? We decided to take a look at the top 100 bestselling list on Amazon.cn, a Chinese shopping website that was taken over by Amazon.com in August 2004.

Here are the top 10 bestselling translated Western books and their prices in RMB on Amazon.cn, and the prices of their English counterparts in USD on Amazon.com, as of May 29, 2012:

From the list above, one can see the average price of these 10 translated Western books in China is 30.02 RMB, or 4.73 USD. This is only 32 percent of the average price of these books in the United States, which is 14.77 USD.

In comparison, the average price of the top 10 locally written Chinese books on Amazon.cn is 27.76 RMB, or 4.37 USD. In other words, there is only a very small difference of 0.36 USD between the average price of translated Western books and that of locally written Chinese books in China.