A number of noted publishers and copyright owners held a press conference in Beijing to protest a promotion campaign by China’s largest online bookseller Dangdang.com more than two months ago.

As part of World Book Day, Dangdang organized a “zero yuan promotion” from April 17th to 19th, when all copyrighted digital books on the portal could be downloaded for free. It is said that the e-book portal did not ask permission from copyright owners before it launched the campaign.

Different from the traditional book retailing business model, Web portals sell digital books first and share the profit with copyright owners according to a pre-agreed proportion, which means that if Dangdang ‘sells’ digital books at zero yuan, copyright owners get nothing. A senior manager at Dangdang’s marketing department said the aim of the campaign was to cultivate reading of genuine electronic materials. However, Dangdang’s acts had already brought economic damages to the publishers.