Internet giant Tencent Literature announced on Friday it is partnering with Trajectory, a publishing company based in Boston, to release 200,000 ebooks in North and South America. Trajectory’s titles will also be available in China on the Tencent platform, which has 820 million users.

It’s bigger than Facebook: Tencent is the fifth-largest Internet company in the world. (After Google, Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba.) You may not be familiar with WeChat, but 820 million people use it.

Literature in translation is not generally spoken of as a lucrative business (the company name “ten cent” seems on the nose), but the tech guys are excited about it. “Never before have so many Chinese language titles become available outside of China,” Trajectory CEO Jim Bryant enthused in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

And it seems they have some reason to be excited: Linghai Tingtao, the #1 sports writer at Qidian, a division of Shanda Cloudary, wrote a book that was read ten million times. It’s titled We Are the Champions. Qidan encouraged users to vote for (and then pay for!) their favorite authors and books.

When Tencent was launched in 2013, many of the employees arrived from Qidan, another online publishing group. (Even the vice president.) Executives said they were violating a contractal clause by quitting their jobs to work for a competitor.

The competing companies must have smoothed things out, because yesterday Shanda and Tencent announced they would be collaborating to start the company’s largest online publishing and ebook company. The Yuewen Group already has 1,200 employees and three million titles. A new Amazon? Not quite. But they’re aiming high.

And yeah, the executive behind the voting model and We Are the Champions is behind this new project.

Wu Nan at the South China Morning Post writes that CEO Wu Wenhui imagines a nationwide reading system “in the coming decade.” The company is designing new readers specifically for the Chinese reader (rather than using the Kindle, which was designed for English language readers).

Let’s not forget that this news is arriving after an October forum on art and literature, called by the president of China, that encouraged writers not to be “slaves” to the marketplace. In fact, ebooks are being reigned in in Beijing at this moment. It’s a strange climate for the launch of a big online publishing company.

James Griffith at the South China Morning Post reports:

[President Xi Jinping] praised controversial author Zhou Xiaoping, whose work is often highly nationalistic and critical of the West, as writing works that “carry positive energy.” According to Foreign Policy, “positive energy” is often used in Communist Party statements to refer to speech which toes the party line.

Xi’s statements were followed by new guidelines from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), China’s top censor, which said that online literature was “filled with derivative, plagiaristic and stereotypical works that seek only economic benefits.” SAPPRFT called on publishers to view “social effects and values” as their priority and not produce “harmful” materials.

We’re rooting for a more diverse marketplace in China. Or really, any article that doesn’t have to mention the top Chinese censor.

Meanwhile, an ereader designed for the Chinese language reader? Designed to compete with the Kindle? A CEO eager to compete with Bezos? We’re curious to see how that launch goes.