Dangdang bides time before e-book plunge

BEIJING - Dangdang.com, China's biggest online book retailer, is still waiting for a better time to launch e-book services, a branch that may help it catch up with its US counterpart Amazon.com and defend itself in the ever fiercer competition of online bookselling in China.

Roger Huang, chief operating officer of Dangdang, said the company has been following the development of digital books for years, but it is still too early to say when it will enter that market in full swing.

"The time is not ripe," Huang said. Huang has three concerns - the high price of electronic readers, rampant copyright infringement and not enough e-book buyers.