BAIDU, China's biggest online search engine, promised at the weekend to delete, within three days, all the unauthorized literature which had been freely available on its Wenku platform.
The move comes in response to an online campaign by writers and publishers who say the free file-sharing platform infringed their copyright by offering copies of their works.
Baidu apologized to the writers and publishers in an online announcement, saying it was "sorry for hurting some writers' emotions in the previous operation of the Wenku system."
Baidu said it hadn't used the writers' works to make money from advertising, but it would like to work with them in future with a paid-for service from which the writers could earn an income.
Many works by some 50-plus writers in the Anti-Baidu Alliance have already been deleted, while some e-books are now available for a fee.
But Baidu's response was not enough to convince some campaigners that their battle against copyright infringement was over as they believed Baidu was not making any significant changes to the Wenku system.
"Even now they still refuse to admit that the system infringed writers' copyrights," said Shen Haobo, a poet and one of the organizers of the campaign, on his Sina microblog.
"There are at least 2.8 million files in the system while approximately two-thirds of them were not authorized by their writers," Zhang Hongbo, another member of the alliance, told Oriental Morning Post. "How can they pick them out and delete them in three days?"
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