I’ve stayed with JD Read mostly out of convenience: my JD membership throws in JD Read for free, and my Boox e-reader has the JD bookstore built in at system level, so the device and the service feel like one piece of software. Recently a blogging friend, conge, invited me into a reading group where nearly everyone was using WeChat Reading. I tried it on the Boox, and the notes below are for anyone weighing the two.
<table> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th>JD Read</th> <th>WeChat Reading</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Catalog size</td> <td>Larger</td> <td>Smaller than JD</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Professional and academic books</td> <td>More</td> <td>Fewer than JD</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Free access</td> <td>More, because a JD Read membership comes with JD membership</td> <td>Roughly 30% of the store through an experience card</td> </tr> <tr> <td>After paying for membership</td> <td>Many professional titles and new releases still need to be bought separately</td> <td>More included than JD</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Integration with Boox</td> <td>System-level</td> <td>An app</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Cross-platform usability</td> <td>Lower than WeChat Reading</td> <td>Better</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Social features</td> <td>Almost none</td> <td>Can interact through WeChat</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Pricing style</td> <td>Simple and direct</td> <td>Lots of promotions and gimmicks</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>If your main goal is reading for free, JD’s bookstore has the edge: the bundled membership covers more books at no extra cost. If you read professional books and can accept the WeChat Reading membership fee, WeChat Reading is the better choice, because the annual fee is far cheaper than buying titles one by one. Its membership schemes are full of little routines. On the monthly route, if you check in 29 days in a month and log more than 30 hours of reading, you can buy a month’s membership for 6 yuan. The annual route uses similar check-ins, but you need to read on at least 360 days in the year. Over such a long stretch it is hard to keep finding free books to sustain the effort, so during the year you may end up paying month by month; if you complete the check-in task, you get a one-year membership for 50 yuan, and after that you can repeat the yearly check-in. If you do not have JD membership, WeChat Reading is still a decent option, and signing in to buy membership is relatively cheap.
Many very niche books are missing from both stores, while bestsellers are basically all there. That is one reason paper books still make up about half of my reading. Paper takes half; JD’s bookstore covers some for free; free resources online cover some; the rest I buy as PDF scans on Taobao. Taobao really is all-powerful—you can find scans of almost any book, including out-of-print ones—but I do not like scans, so I do not buy many unless a book is truly out of print.
I picked a few books at random. The web version is not great for managing the bookstore, but the app is more convenient.
For now I do not need to buy a WeChat Reading membership, because my usage is low and I simply would not complete the check-ins, though whether I will make an impulse purchase later is hard to say.
WeChat Reading handles reading notes in a surprisingly friendly way: you can copy them all out, and the system is not closed off. When pasted into Youdao Cloud Note or OneNote, the copied notes still look acceptable.
You can see the format in Youdao Cloud Note here: The Book of Life: 365 Days of Quiet Meditation.
Besides online bookstores, I also use Ximalaya heavily. My eyes get dry, so I cannot read continuously, and many lectures on Ximalaya are good. Those resources have not been published as physical books, so they make a useful supplement to reading.
Finally, I would recommend the Boox e-reader. After more than a year of use, I have found it very good.
April 3 update: After a few days of trial, I have decided to buy membership cards through monthly check-ins. There are two reasons. First, paid WeChat Reading really does offer many more books than the free JD bookstore. Second, I want the check-ins to push me to read more. At home I probably still have around 200 unread paper books, and I have about 300 e-books downloaded from JD’s bookstore and other sources onto the Boox. Even so, I could not resist opening another front on WeChat and checking in every day—much like a monkey dropping one ear of corn to pick up another.