About SuperStar Digital Library

SuperStar Digital Library

SuperStar Digital Library (Chinese: 超星数字图书馆, pinyin Chaoxing Shuzi Tushuguan; commonly Chaoxing or SuperStar), operated by Beijing Century Superstar Information Technology Development Co., Ltd., is one of China's pioneering digital library companies. It operates one of the largest collections of digitised Chinese-language books in the world, together with DuXiu, an academic full-text search and discovery platform, Zhizhen (marketed as SuperStar Discovery), a bibliographic metadata discovery service, and the Chaoxing Xuexitong learning platform used across Chinese higher education. Few companies anywhere have shaped how a language's book heritage moved online as directly as this Beijing firm.

Founding in 1993 and the digitisation business

The operating company was founded in 1993 as a private enterprise, making it one of the oldest electronic book companies in China. In its early years its main business was digitising paper documents for government bodies and academic institutions, using its proprietary PDG image format. In 1996 it entered electronic publishing, producing over 200 CD-ROM products including older periodicals and historical archival documents, and by the end of 1997 it had developed a web-based e-book publishing system. That sequence — service digitisation first, publishing second, web delivery third — gave the company both the technical stack and the content relationships it would need when it launched its own library.

The PDG format and the company's scanning workflows were products of necessity: in the 1990s there was no standard pipeline for turning Chinese paper books into usable digital editions at scale, so SuperStar built one. The clients of that era — government and academic institutions — also formed the market it would later sell the finished library back to.

The National Library contract and the 2000 launch

The decisive event came in 1998, when the National Library of China began building the National Digital Library of China with substantial state investment. SuperStar won a digitisation contract and, between July 1998 and December 1999, converted around 200,000 titles of paper books held by the National Library into electronic form. The company retained copies of the digitised books, and those files formed the core of the SuperStar Digital Library when it launched its own online service in January 2000. The accumulated corpus gave it a significant competitive advantage over other Chinese e-book companies: competitors starting in 2000 had empty shelves; SuperStar opened with a national-library-scale collection already digitised.

The library grew from that base into one of the largest collections of digitised Chinese-language books in the world. A scholarly case study in the Journal of Academic Librarianship described the associated knowledge base as holding more than 2.3 million digitised books spanning chemical engineering, Chinese history, economics, law and other fields, and identified SuperStar as one of the three major commercial e-book providers selling to libraries in China, alongside Apabi and Sursen.

DuXiu: academic search and discovery

DuXiu (读秀, "reading excellence"), the company's academic search platform, was launched in the mid-2000s — Stanford University Libraries records the service as beginning in 2005 based on vendor information, while other sources give 2007. DuXiu changed the unit of discovery from the book to the passage: a scholar search engine over the full text of the digitised collection, letting researchers find where a term, person or idea appears inside hundreds of thousands of Chinese books, then read or obtain the surrounding text. The Journal of Academic Librarianship case study, written when DuXiu was new, presented it as the discovery layer that made the SuperStar knowledge base usable for scholarship rather than only for reading whole volumes.

For Chinese studies worldwide, DuXiu became essential infrastructure: libraries from Stanford onward licensed it because there was no comparable full-text window into the modern Chinese book corpus.

Zhizhen, journals and ChinaMaxx

The company's later discovery layer, Zhizhen — also marketed as SuperStar Discovery — is a bibliographic metadata service claimed to index over one billion bibliographic records, connecting the book collection to the wider universe of catalogue data. The company also operates Chaoxing Qikan, a journal and newspaper platform extending the model from books to periodicals, and ChinaMaxx, a digital library platform packaged for overseas institutions — the channel through which foreign university libraries license Chinese e-book collections under a name and interface aimed at them. Together these products show the company's method: one digitised corpus, several discovery and delivery surfaces for different user communities.

Chaoxing Xuexitong and the learning platform era

SuperStar's most widely used later product is Chaoxing Xuexitong, a learning platform designed for online learning and adopted widely by Chinese universities for course delivery, reading and study management. Its national prominence peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Xuexitong was one of the learning platforms recommended by the Ministry of Education during lockdowns, as contemporary reporting by TMTPost notes — a moment when the company's infrastructure carried a significant share of Chinese higher education's emergency move online.

The platform also brought scrutiny: in June 2022 Xuexitong faced a public controversy over reported user information leakage, with a security team claiming tens of millions of records were being traded. The company responded that after an investigation lasting over ten hours it had found no evidence confirming the reported leakage, and that Xuexitong does not store users' passwords, using one-way encrypted storage. The episode is part of the platform's public record and illustrates the data-governance exposure that comes with operating education infrastructure at national scale.

How libraries and readers use SuperStar

The library model is institutional: universities and libraries license the digital library, DuXiu and discovery services, and their readers access Chinese books and search inside them through the institution. For overseas Chinese-studies collections, SuperStar and ChinaMaxx fill a structural gap — print acquisition of Chinese books is slow and selective, while the digitised corpus offers breadth no physical collection abroad can match. For individual Chinese readers, the Chaoxing name is encountered through university platforms and reading apps rather than as a bookshop brand.

The company's longevity rests on that institutional embedding. A collection digitised in 1998–99, a search engine from the mid-2000s and a learning platform from the mobile era are successive layers of the same strategy: own the digital form of Chinese books, and build the tools each generation uses to reach them.

Copyright and the digitisation legacy

Any honest history of early Chinese e-books includes the copyright tensions of mass digitisation; scholarly discussion of DuXiu and SuperStar has long noted the copyright questions raised by building a commercial library from scanned books, in parallel with the disputes that accompanied Google Books in the West, to which the academic case study explicitly compares it. Those debates form part of the context in which China's digital publishing rules developed, and SuperStar's corpus — assembled under a national library contract before clear frameworks existed — remains a case study in how digitisation outran the law in every major market at once.

Position in China's information industry

SuperStar is classified in this directory as an academic information agency: it produces and curates information infrastructure — digitised books, full-text search, metadata discovery and learning platforms — rather than news. Founded in 1993, operating one of the world's largest Chinese-language digital book collections, and embedded in the daily study life of Chinese universities, it is among the most consequential Chinese information companies of the internet era.

Access and official website

SuperStar's official website is chaoxing.com, with DuXiu at duxiu.com. Access to the digital library and DuXiu is primarily through institutional subscriptions at universities and libraries in China and abroad. For this directory, SuperStar Digital Library is recorded as a Beijing, China digital library and academic information service.