SHANGHAI, Aug. 13 -- MORE and more Chinese are buying books on the Internet, according to a new survey.

However, according to the fourth national reading survey by China Research Institute of Publishing Science, there has been a decrease in China's national reading ratio over the past six years.

But as e-commerce became part of people's daily life, the book market has seen a big leap in sales volume.

"Online bookstores made it possible for people to have access to more options, at the same time boosting the print book market," said Qu Mingying, a researcher with the Beijing-based CRIPS.

"Generally speaking, the prosperity of virtual bookstores has had some impact on their real-world counterparts, but not that significantly," Qu commented.

An earlier report issued by AC Nielsen revealed that China has the highest online book-buying rate in the world.

About 63 percent of Chinese Internet users had made online purchases and 56 percent of those had bought reading materials, the highest ratio in the world, said the report in 2005. Dangdang.com, China's biggest online bookseller, recently saw a boom in its sales volume and readership, respectively.

"The figure hasn't been updated yet, but the rate is definitely going higher," said Li Guoqing, CEO of Dangdang.com.

Yet things are not so rosy with traditional bookstores.

"Many people come to our bookstore just to write down the names of the books they want and then go online shopping. We are embarrassed," said a sales clerk at a traditional bookstore in Beijing.

A fierce price war is taking shape between traditional bookstores and their online counterparts. Faced with the low-cost advantage of online bookstores, traditional ones can do nothing but lower their prices.

During the recent release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," Joyo.com offered the book 70 percent cheaper than its regular price.

However, Huang Yuhai, chairman of 99read.com, another online bookseller, said the total sales volume of China's three biggest online stores was 500 million yuan (US$66.7 million), just two percent of China's total book market. Amazon.com's sales were about 40 percent of the total American market.