The Kindle, which has been ridiculed as "half cover noodles, half hanging idle fish", is Amazon's e-book reader and has been synonymous with the field since its launch. Whether it's mental recharge or alleviating the symptoms of "buying books like a mountain, reading like a silk", Kindle is a good medicine.
In recent days, some netizens pointed out that the Kindle has a wide range of shortages, the Kindle official Taobao store is closed, and the kindle Jingdong self-operated flagship store only has 1 658 yuan youth version in stock.
Is this a signal for Amazon's e-book business to exit the country? Users are also worried that if Kindle withdraws from the Chinese market, will e-book stores, cloud favorites and software services have an impact?
Kindle Jingdong self-operated flagship store customer service said that the shortage is due to the lack of chips in the manufacturer, and has not received a notice to withdraw from the Chinese market.
On the evening of January 3, @Kindle China was still updating and forwarding the book donation activities on Weibo.
At noon on January 4, Amazon officially responded to Sina Technology:
We are committed to serving Chinese consumers. Consumers can purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers. Some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market. The high-quality customer service and warranty services provided by Amazon will not change.
In fact, the kindle official Taobao store has been closed for a while, and Amazon's official website in China has long stopped selling kindle, only doing e-book sales, and online hardware sales are now only one channel for JD.com.
However, Kindle does not make money solely on hardware, but instead makes steady profits from long-term digital content sales, including direct purchases and monthly subscriptions.
Many Kindle users are looking for Amazon's book resources. Of course, you can also use mailbox, USB, app, etc. to manually transfer books.
The storm on the hot search also shows that although the Kindle is often ridiculed as a bubble noodle artifact, it cannot escape the fate of dust, but it is close to the ink screen of the paper book texture, immersive reading, durable quality, and easy to carry, which is indeed favored by many loyal users.
At the same time, the Kindle is becoming more and more like a fringe product.
Image courtesy of Unsplash
There are already many apps on mobile phones and tablets that meet our fragmented, social, or audiovisual reading needs, but at the same time, there are other features that interfere with the efforts of the book sea. The richer it is, the more disturbing it becomes.
The Kindle is "more than ten years of day", focusing on reading for a long time, but it can only be used to "brush books", and it cannot write and draw like a tablet. With a gentle and subtle iteration, a kindle is enough to fight for another N years.
This kind of old-fashioned style of not forgetting the original intention is both an advantage and a weakness, which will not only make it obsolete for a long time, but also may make it become a chicken rib of "the tastelessness of food and the pity of abandonment".
Looking at the country, kindle has many competitors. Wenshi, Palm Reading, Xiaomi, Dangdang, etc. have their own e-readers, and WeChat reading e-readers have also been listed, some rely on their own libraries, and some are open systems.
The idea of "putting a bookstore in your pocket" still holds, and a digital bookstore is not necessarily where it is. When the space for hardware upgrades is getting smaller and smaller, e-reader users are actually looking at the content ecology.
Massive online texts, WeChat long articles or large tomes can be equipped with a variety of readers, and reading and learning is no longer limited to the form of "watching". But the kindle that first made e-readers deeply rooted in people's hearts always seems to have its fans.
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It is the greatest motivation for us