Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s shopping platform Tmall rolled out an app for electronic books in an effort to target China's growing digital reading market, according to a June 14 post on the company's Alizila news site.

The new Tmall Reader app was developed with Alibaba Literature, another online business unit under the Chinese e-commerce giant.

It offers access to titles across a range of genres including business, children's stories and Chinese translations of foreign books. Selections available through the app will come from Tmall's roster of nearly 3,000 booksellers and 300 publishers.

Tmall also plans to introduce additional features on the app such as audiobooks, reader communities and discussion forums.

The percentage of Chinese readers using digital devices has grown for nine consecutive years to reach 73% in 2017, Alibaba said, citing statistics from the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication.