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Sales are still there, but word of mouth can't come back
Written by Meng Huiyuan
Editor/Li Wenjie
The "bubble noodle artifact" Kindle is actually going to quit China? No, it's just out of stock.
Recently, because amazon's China official website on the kindle full line of products showed no stock, Jingdong's official Kindle flagship store also appeared a large area of non-stock phenomenon, coupled with the previously closed Taobao flagship store, kindle was flooded by rumors of "withdrawing from the Chinese market".
In response, Amazon China's latest response is: "We are committed to serving Chinese consumers. Consumers can purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers. The Kindle e-book reader is popular with consumers, and some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market. ”
But the sales are still there, but the word of mouth cannot return. The sense of existence is so low that it can only be used to press the bubble noodles of the "Kindles", in the eyes of many users, it has long been a pity to abandon the "chicken ribs" of tastelessness and abandonment - the use experience of hardware is not as good as that of mobile phone reading APP, and the rich and affordable content is not comparable to pirated resources that do not want money.
But the e-reader, which seems to be outdated, has attracted hardware equipment vendors and content providers to bet on it?
From the magic life of "Reader Brother" to "Bubble Face Artifact"
Looking back on the Kindle's 15 years of life so far, as the first typical product to eat the e-reader dividend, it has set a record in the local market of "5 and a half hours was snapped up", not to mention, its performance when it first entered the Chinese market is also good - since the day the Kindle officially entered China in June 2013, the eye-catching sales data has made it sit firmly in the position of "e-reader brother".
By 2018, China had become Amazon's largest market for global Kindle device sales. According to data released by Amazon China, in the five years since entering China, the Kindle e-book reader has sold millions of units in China. At that time, the total number of books in the Kindle China Electronic Bookstore was nearly 700,000 copies, an increase of nearly 10 times compared with 2013.
Of course, at this time, some domestic enterprises have seen the development potential of e-readers and have devoted themselves to the field of digital reading, such as palm reading technology, millet, Wenshi, etc., making the electronic reading industry gradually move towards a hundred flowers, and competition has begun to become fierce. But from the specific sales performance, the Kindle still occupies the leading position.
According to the sales evaluation data of Jingdong's own products, the fourth generation of Amazon Kindle paperwhite has accumulated more than 200,000 reviews, the highest-selling e-book reader evaluation number of Xiaomi multi-look and palm reading is 50,000+, and the highest sales product evaluation of Opry BOOX is 10,000+.
Including this withdrawal from China's oolong incident, it is actually "sold out" rather than "exit", which actually shows the best-selling degree of Kindle in the domestic e-reader market.
According to relevant reports, in overseas channels such as Amazon's official website, some models of the Kindle are also out of stock. Some insiders said that this situation does not only occur in China, but should be a shortage of chips leading to a global shortage of supplies.
So how did Kindle go from being a domestic "reader brother" to a "bubble noodle artifact"? Even the official can't help but personally go down and actively claim this title that can't be beaten with its actual function?
According to relevant news reports, on March 22, 2019, the Kindle at that time was still operating normally on Tmall, and it placed a picture advertisement in the scroll bar of the Tmall APP homepage, and a bucket of instant noodles was pressed under the protagonist's new Kindle, and the accompanying slogan was: "Cover kindle, noodles are more fragrant."
The Kindle's ad claimed the title of "Bubble Face Artifact."
Or to cater to users, or self-deprecating hype, this time advertising marketing in the circle at the same time, but also broke the embarrassment of its products - users after the purchase of Kindle, the frequency of use is not high, talk is better than nothing, so that users are no longer careful to treat this device worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but directly use it as a board.
Some users once sighed on social platforms: "A person said that the kindle is a bubble noodle artifact, which is a bit interesting." The screen is full of this meme, just like not laughing hard creaking, as embarrassing. Buying a Kindle is not used, only used to press bubble noodles, is this glorious? ”
In the topic square of #Amazon's e-book business to withdraw from the domestic market, a netizen's reply may explain everything, "The biggest problem with this product is that the decline of paper books is also the decline of books, the decline of reading habits and the change of access to information." Short videos, short articles have changed people's habits, books can only belong to a part of the professionals, that's all. ”
There are substitutes for hardware and software, and consumers just don't love it
The change in the reputation of the Kindle is not unrelated to the change in consumer usage habits.
Initially, the Attraction of Kindle users mainly lies in three points: one is that the ink screen is closer to the effect of reading paper books, which is more eye-pleasing than the simple electronic screen; the second is that the function is simple, and reading books with it can completely avoid the interference of other entertainment and social software; the third is the ever-expanding e-book mall, and its portability and note digitization and other functions are remarkable.
These advantages also confirm Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's view that if Kindle wants to succeed, it must be used as a "serious cultural vehicle." However, facts have proved that under the overall trend of consumption upgrading, it is difficult to meet the continuous upward consumption needs of consumers by only using themselves as a pure reading tool.
According to the results of the 18th National Reading Survey released by the China Press and Publication Research Institute, in terms of reading forms, the proportion of adult citizens who prefer to "read a paper book" is 43.4%, "reading on mobile phones" accounts for 33.4%, "reading on electronic readers accounts for only 8.6%", and listening to books accounts for 6.7%.
It is not difficult to see that in the digital reading segment, the form of mobile phone reading has long been "king", and the trend of "listening to books" as a rising star catching up with e-readers is very obvious. On the other hand, "e-readers", although the overall proportion of 7.8% compared with the previous year's proportion is stable and rising, but compared with the rapid rise of the first two, it has already touched the development ceiling early.
Taking Kindle as an example, users can only see the limited e-books in Amazon Book City through it, and in the process of user use, they have also found many inconveniences: the ink screen refresh rate is low, and it will leave a residual shadow when turning the page; only black and white colors are displayed, and PDF books and color graphics cannot be read; although it is advertised as eye protection, the actual effect is difficult to measure.
Just like the once popular MP3, MP4 and other single hardware devices, which were eventually eliminated in the torrent of the times, mobile phones that integrate games, audio-visual, e-books and other functions have become the most indispensable tools in life with more and more functions.
The data shows that in 2020, the average daily contact time of adult citizens in China is 100.75 minutes, and the average daily reading time of e-readers is only 11.44 minutes.
As Xiang Ligang, a smart Internet expert, said, the biggest problem facing Kindle is product competitiveness, and the operating experience is not very good. In addition, the entire e-reader market is also relatively niche, for a foreign company like Amazon, the operating costs in China are relatively high, and the profit level is not very high.
Competitors such as Palm Reading, Xiaomi, and Aragonite, although they have had a certain impact on the Kindle through similar products with advantages such as sound and color, the last curve overtaking is more likely to be a mobile phone that makes the digital reading ecology better and better.
Palm reading e-reader
If mobile hardware can only be used to press bubble noodles, then the software ecology always has merit, right? Indeed, in terms of amazon's proud collection of books, the Kindle claims to have more than 700,000 books, and in most cases, the books that users want to read can basically be found in the Kindle. Among the domestic brands, as the only reader with a book city, its collection of books is only more than 600,000 volumes, and there is still room to catch up.
Before talking about this issue, it is also necessary to understand that Kindle is an e-commerce platform reading category expansion reading hardware product, similar to Dangdang Reader, JD JDread, etc.; Brands such as Hanwang and Wenshi should belong to reader manufacturers (can carry third-party book sources); as for palm reading, WeChat reading, etc. are supporting products for reading APP.
However, from the perspective of consumers, these products all face the same problem - piracy. The deep-seated "free" reading habit in the domestic market is not friendly to the Kindle under the paid buyout system, and Kindle users have shortcuts to downloading pirates and uploading them before reading.
According to the video report of Beijing News Shell Finance, in addition to the pirated book resources produced and shared by individuals, there are also many pirate practitioners specializing in book cracking and resale. On their websites, WeChat public accounts or other platforms, e-books with an original price of 10 yuan or 20 yuan may only be sold for one yuan or two yuan, and the content of the book is cracked from the genuine book.
In addition, Zhou Geng, an associate professor at the Business School of Nanjing University, also pointed out that kindle is not like a reading APP, which can predict the sales of better books and buy book copyrights, and cannot keep up with subsequent content updates.
It can be seen that the competitive advantage of its hardware and software is not as good as before, even if there is still a sales volume that can be called "a brother", the Kindle is no longer an irreplaceable reader.
Why should they be stuck with non-rigid e-readers?
Compared with feature-rich mobile phones, e-readers are not just needed, nor are they of special use, and the demand is still very small, why will it attract hardware equipment vendors, telecom operators, content providers and so on in the industry to compete for deer?
"These companies are just making hardware with a false shot, targeting the entire online literature market." Earlier, Zhang Yi, chairman of Ai Media Consulting, said in an interview with the media that reading texts, palm reading, etc. have launched their own e-readers, and they do not simply want to sell hardware, because with this as the entrance, behind it is a huge ecological chain.
Inspiration still comes from the Kindle. At the beginning of the Kindle's sale, Amazon lost $2 to $3 for every Kindle sold, but Amazon did not panic at all, because it mainly made profits by users consuming digital content. In other words, buying a hardware device is equivalent to binding its back-end ecosystem, so that Amazon has established an ecological closed loop in digital reading.
In other words, as an e-reader brand, but also a network cultural knowledge platform or sales platform such as books, with an e-reader, it can provide users with its own content resources to achieve user retention and continuous ordering services.
Although mobile phones are constantly occupying the market space of e-readers with fragmented reading, it should be noted that when mobile reading APPS gradually become an important application category, they are actually subtly cultivating more consumers with online reading habits.
Relevant data show that whether from the demand side or the supply side, the digital reading market has shown a good momentum of vigorous development. It is estimated that the market size of China's digital reading industry will reach 34.59 billion yuan in 2021. In this case, although mobile phones read the vast majority of users, the larger the number of digital reading users, the larger the number of e-readers to be transferred.
This is not only an opportunity for e-reader brands to break through, but also an opportunity for online reading platforms to break the competition situation in the Red Sea. Because under the current situation of the fading traffic dividend, the online reading industry has intensified, and if the platform wants to find a new traffic growth point, it needs to jump out of the competition dimension between the platform and the platform.
At this stage, e-readers such as the Kindle may only have the meaning of embossed noodles for consumers, but the underlying logic of reading manufacturers to develop e-readers is still there.
However, consumer feedback that e-books have become "chicken ribs" cannot be ignored. Therefore, the outside world can see that domestic manufacturers have begun to try to adapt the original single reading hardware to a variety of application scenarios like mobile phones. For example, the e-book reader is combined with the functions of writing notes, voice transcription, and sending and receiving emails.
Hanvon Technology e-book equipped with intelligent office functions
According to relevant media reports, a handwritten electronic paper product 1001 recently released by Hanwang Technology adopts the Android open system, which can make the electronic paper book have better system compatibility, such as using different kinds of Apps to listen to songs, listen to books and make handwritten notes on schedules, so that its use scenarios are no longer limited to reading.
But whether consumers buy it and whether e-books find new development highlights will take some time to observe.
END
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