The Chinese are going to say goodbye to Kindle completely.
On June 30 this year, Amazon Kindle China Weibo issued a notice that after June 30, 2023, the public will not be able to purchase new e-books. As for the purchased e-books, they can download and continue reading before June 30, 2024.
On social media, many netizens have begun to nostalgia for Kindle and shared the stories of their acquaintance with Kindle.
“Nostalgic for youth, Kindle accompanied me through the gloomy senior year of high school”
“The Kindle, which I used to pester my mother for a long time, has now become my instant noodle cover.”
“Witness from beginning to end, it’s a pity.”
It has been a full ten years since Kindle entered China in 2013. It was once claimed to subvert the existence of paper books. Kindle will also become a tear of the times in China.
How did Kindle go from glory to failure?
The annual sales volume exceeds one million units, and Kindle also has a glorious moment
Contrary to public perception, Kindle is not the inventor of e-books or e-books, but is actually an optimizer of user experience.
Kindle’s name comes from a graphic designer in San Francisco, which means “to light a flame”, as a metaphor for the excitement brought about by books and wisdom. Kindle creates an integrated software and hardware experience through seamless integration with online library, and combined with Amazon’s e-commerce channel advantages, consumers can purchase Kindle devices and online books anytime, anywhere.
On November 19, 2007, the first-generation Kindle was officially released, priced at $399. Within five and a half hours, the first batch of 25,000 units were sold out, and the replenishment was not completed until April of the following year.
In 2013, Kindle, which has been invincible all over the world, expanded its business in China for the first time. At that time, China’s e-reader market had not yet opened, and Kindle quickly seized consumers’ minds with its unique experience of e-ink screen.
It is reported that Kindle’s electronic ink screen can not only restore the reading experience of paper books, but more importantly, it does not emit light, does not consume power, and can achieve long battery life while protecting the eyes.
Because of this unique selling point, Since Kindle entered the Chinese market in 2013, sales have not been low.
According to the data released by Amazon China, as early as 2016, China became the largest market for Amazon’s global Kindle sales, and in 2018, the annual sales volume exceeded one million units.
According to public data, in 2017 and 2018, Kindle’s domestic market share was about 80%. However, since the second half of 2022, domestic Kindle sales have plummeted by 61% year-on-year, and its market share has also fallen to fourth place.
So, why can’t Kindle stay in the huge Chinese market?
Kindle enters China “acclimatized”
Kindle sales in China are indeed good, but selling more does not mean earning more.
Amazon doesn’t make money selling Kindle hardware. According to research firm iSuppli, the basic Kindle, which sells for $79, costs $84.25 to make. The cost is $5 more than the selling price, which is a complete loss.
How does Kindle make money?
Bezos once said at the launch of the original Kindle, “This is not a device, but a service.” This sentence points out Amazon’s profit model for developing this business: hardware products are not the core profit point, and commissions for e-book distribution and membership service fees are the wealth codes.
to be honest,It is selling books and selling membership services.However, neither of these two businesses can go up in China.
In terms of selling books, overseas publishing houses generally release hardcover books first, and then paperbacks. When Kindle bookstores launch e-books and hardcover books at the same time, e-books will have a certain price advantage.
However, in China, a large number of books are basically sold in paperback editions. In addition, major bookstores often sell at discounts, and Kindle e-books are even more expensive than paper books. Not to mention that pirated books are rampant in China, and it is even more difficult to earn Chinese people’s reading fees.
In terms of book types, Kindle is also “unaccustomed” to Chinese readers. Kindle focuses on classic literature, but domestic users love to read online literature. According to the “2021 Digital Reading Report”, 54.56% of platform users prefer online literature. However, in terms of online literature, Kindle’s copyright scope is far inferior to Tomato and Qimao Novels, which focus on online literature in China.
When I went to read online, some users complained that Kindle can’t read online articles, and they have to rely on domestic APPs to read online articles.
In addition, Kindle’s membership service is not very popular with Chinese people. Kindle’s reading membership service is called Unlimited, but it’s not really unlimited.
In reality, even if you subscribe to the membership service, more than half of the books in the mall are still unreadable. For example, in the soaring list of the Kindle online bookstore, among the top ten books in the top nine, only three books are added to Unlimited.
This is indeed the case. In 2018, the total number of Kindle users in China increased by 91 times, but the paid users of Kindle only increased by 12 times, which shows that more people did not use its membership service after buying Kindle.
Compared with spending money to buy books and open memberships, Chinese people prefer to buy equipment with a one-time payment, free post-production fees, and all-inclusive software and hardware experience methods, so kindle has not been profitable in China.
In addition, the hard-to-use system has also become the flaw of Kindle. Many users have reported that Kindle has problems such as slow page turning, incomplete page number display, and poor screen accuracy.
Moreover, Kindle’s built-in system is only compatible with mobi, azw, and azw3 e-book formats, and the txt files downloaded by users from the Internet have to be transcoded once before they can be read, but after importing, it is easy to encounter problems such as garbled characters and missing words.
Therefore, the first time many domestic users get the Kindle is to flash the Kindle to the Android system, and then use the reading app on the Android.
The membership service is not good, and the sense of experience is also lagging behind. Kindle is really a good card. Many netizens jokingly said, “Kindle has long been my instant noodle cover.” On second-hand trading platforms such as Xianyu, you can also see that many idle Kindles are being traded.
However, this time Kindle withdrew from China, and Amazon did a decent job of dealing with the aftermath.
For example, in terms of membership refunds for Kindle Unlimited, Amazon will refund the unexpired membership fees to you directly. As long as the Kindle purchased after January 2022 has no quality problems or man-made damage, Amazon can also give you a refund.
“Rise” of domestic readers
Interestingly, while Kindle has fallen from the altar, the domestic e-reading market is thriving.
According to the latest “2022 Digital Reading Report”, the overall revenue of my country’s digital reading market in 2022 will be 46.352 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11.50%; the number of digital reading users will reach 530 million, with a growth rate of 4.75%. In terms of reading form preference, the usage rate of electronic reading form is as high as 93.4%.
According to the Tianyancha platform, there are currently more than 2,800 e-book-related companies in China whose names and business scope include “e-books, e-books”, and whose status is active, surviving, moving in, and moving out.
At the same time, there has also been a wave of involuntary e-readers in China. Zhangyue, Yuewen, JD.com, Dangdang, Aragonite, Xiaomi, Hanwang, HKUST Xunfei and other companies have all launched their own reader products. According to the data released by Luotu Technology, in the first quarter of 2023, the top 10 brands in the domestic e-reader sales market share are Palm Read, HKUST Xunfei, Aragonite, Kindle, Hanwang, Duokan, Huawei, Xiaoyuan, Moan, and Hisense.
Unlike Kindle, which is difficult to integrate into the Chinese market due to its high quality and few, domestic readers have continued to evolve based on the actual needs of domestic users, and have innovated in both product functions and services.
For example, Kindle’s technology iteration speed is relatively slow. Since the first generation change in 2007, Kindle has only launched Paperwhite, oasis and other series of products, and a total of 10 generations of products have been launched in 15 years.
but Domestic readers are indeed richer than Kindle in terms of light weight, size and function diversity.
According to the incomplete statistics of the Chief Business Review, in the past two years, HKUST Xunfei has launched multiple reader sizes including 7.8 inches, 9.7 inches, 10 inches, 10.3 inches, and 13.3 inches; Palm Reader has also launched a variety of reader products, including color ink screens, support for WeChat reading, and thin and light models.
In addition, domestic readers also aimed at the hardware shortage of Kindle, and launched a series of innovative solutions. For example, the readers launched by brands such as Palm Reading, Aragonite, and iFlytek have open systems, adaptable office software, and come with office functions such as telephone, recording, and voice recognition.
From the current point of view, most of the domestic reader brands are backed by the ecological support of Internet giants. For example, Xiaomi Technology is behind Duokan and Moan; iFLYTEK’s advantage lies in “hardware + technology”; Dangdang and JD.
In terms of services, domestic readers have also “adapted to local conditions”, and have developed three clear paths in the domestic e-book market, namely the payment model of per-view/month/year, the free model of advertising monetization, and the content marketing model of IP monetization.
In recent years, many reading apps earn advertising fees by providing genuine free reading. According to relevant data from the iResearch Prospective Industry Research Institute, affected by the free reading model, the proportion of user-paid revenue in the domestic online literature market has dropped from 84.2% in 2016 to 74.1% in 2020, while advertising revenue has risen from 1.9% in 2016 to 15% in 2020.
In fact, not only domestic readers, Kindle’s opponents also have various mobile phone reading apps and various audio listening apps.
For example, many people choose to use WeChat to read books. The reason they give is that WeChat reading is not only convenient for reading, but also has friendly social functions. You can see the books your friends have recently read and their reading notes on the friends’ reading list.
Listening to books and listening to cultural podcasts are also very popular among young people, especially for car owners, opening the listening app during commuting can save time.
Another point that cannot be ignored is that with the development of short videos, watching videos to disassemble books has become a new habit of many people. The “2023 China Network Audio-Visual Development Research Report” shows that in 2022, the average daily use of short videos by Chinese users will reach 168 minutes, which is a 40% increase from 120 minutes in 2021.
Mr. Li, who has been engaged in financial work for five years, said, “In the past two years, I will use related videos of the same type of knowledge instead of reading books. I feel that the videos are more concrete and less exhausting.”
In short,Kindle’s exit from China was due to an unsuccessful business competition, but behind it were hidden local habits and deep changes in China’s consumer electronics, online reading, and even pan-entertainment markets.
