……is the cash cow for Chinese company Shanda Literature Ltd, a
subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment.

The company’s business model is simple: read the first half
of a book online for free, and if you want to know the rest
(which usually is the case if you have read that far) you need
to pay for it. Revenues are split with the stories’ authors.

In China, this proves to be successful. According to Shanda
Literature CEO Hou Xiaoqing, the company now has cash reserves
of $1.8 billion, with 800,000 authors creating up to 80,000 new
pages of content per day, he said at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

On web portals such as www.qidian.com and www.hongxiu.com,
customers can chose from a huge variety of stories, and the best
even make it into print.

Xiaoqing said the company has also teamed up with China
Mobile to distribute literature via mobile phones, a
business model that he said was “very promising”.

He added it was now for Shanda to explore whether those
business ideas also work in other parts of the world, including
Europe.

Could this be a business model for other publishing companies as well?

What do you think?

Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.

But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.

The update was one of several new features that Google has unveiled over the past week as it seeks to refine the tool used by two out of every three people searching the Web.

Google also introduced a feature that lets users specify whether they want results that are heavier on shopping-oriented Web pages, such as retail sites with products and pricing information, or results that are less commercial in nature.

The shopping option comes as Microsoft tries to lure people to its revamped Bing search engine by highlighting Bing’s strength in shopping and travel searches.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s real time search engine is becoming the Internet’s go-to place for finding the most current information on world events, from earthquakes to political protests.

Google officials said the new search features are not responses to the competition.

Previously, Google let users narrow search results to items posted in the past week or 24 hours.

According to Google officials, the introduction of up-to-the-hour searches doesn’t represent a change in the way Google crawls the Web - the same results were previously available in Google’s index, there just wasn’t a way for someone to only view the really fresh stuff.

Of course serving up results from the past hour is hardly the same as the up-to-the-minute information provided by real time search.

But until Google figures out how it wants to play the real time search game, the company is moving to make its flagship search engine more au courrant.

Give the “Glass is Half Full” award to Stan Glasgow, Sony’s top U.S. electronics executive, ahead of what could be the most crucial (and potential painful) “Black Friday” shopping weekend in many years. It’s normally a happy time of year, filled with family gathering, gifts, etc.

This year its different. Read the papers, or a blog. Things look pretty gloomy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, things aren’t as bad as they seem, Glasgow told a gathering of journalists on Thursday, suggesting that there are great bargains to be had on cool gadgets and big TVs, if consumers can overcome their apprehension.

Glasgow, a passionate engineer-by-trade, whose casual briefings with the tech press are usually chock full of geek-y chatter about flat screen TVs, Digital SLR Cameras and OLED displays, took on the economy, such as it is.

His message in short: Yes We Can shop our way out of this mess:

All of us get shell-shocked a little, that we have been disappointed by the events that have happened in the economy. We’d like to think that it’s an opportunity. I’ve asked our employees to get out there and get aggressive, to come up with new ideas how to do things better for Sony, but also to begin to talk to their friends and family about ‘its a good time to buy products — the values are good right now.’

Prices have gone down on every product. It’s almost a deflationary time period in terms of good and services in this country. What that means is that everything is going down in price, including oil and gold and stocks and bonds and everything. It is not a bad time to buy products, it is not a bad time to make investments. So I’m encouraging our people — and I’m encouraging all of you around the table — that we can play a part in helping restore consumer confidence.

(Reuters photo of Stan Glasgow)