Wen | Zhang Kexin of the Weekly Magazine of Finance and Economics
Editor| Yang Jie
Nine years after entering China, Amazon's "reading artifact" Kindle was rumored to withdraw from the Chinese market.
On the first working day after New Year's Day in 2022, some consumers reported that Amazon's e-reading product Kindle was out of stock in a large area in Jingdong's self-operated flagship store. For a time, news about the closure of Amazon Kindle's official flagship store, shortage of goods, and the dismantling of the hardware team continued to ferment on social platforms, and related topics quickly rushed to Weibo hot search.
Some media quoted relevant personnel within Amazon China as saying that the company's Kindle hardware team was abolished in November 2021, and there will no longer be a Kindle electronic device business in the domestic market. In this regard, Amazon did not respond positively, only saying that the Kindle e-book reader is out of stock because some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market; in the future, consumers can still purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers, and the customer service and warranty services provided by Amazon will not change.
But interestingly, after the news of the Kindle's shortage of stock, on social media, the first reaction of most netizens was: "There will be no lid for bubble noodles in the future!" Although it is mostly ridiculous, many users said that the Kindle at home is "eating ash" in the drawer most of the time.
The Kindle, which entered the Chinese market in 2013 and set off a reform of national reading habits, has now been rumored to be lost and "withdrawn". How did it become a "cover bubble noodle artifact"?
"Missing core" caused the Kindle to run out of stock?
When seeing the topic of "Kindle or exiting the Chinese market", as a Kindle user, Chen You's first reaction was: "Oops, my annual membership will not be useless, right?" ”
He said that when he renewed the annual fee for the Kindle last month, it was automatically changed to "renewal fee" by Amazon's platform, "Is this a sign?" ”
Open the official self-operated flagship store of Jingdong Kindle, except for the youth version of the Kindle with a price of 658 yuan, which is still on sale, the rest of the Kindle models are displayed in a "no stock" state.
The Youth Kindle is Amazon's 2019 entry-level series for the low-end Kindle. In addition, the Kindle also includes two types of equipment with different price points and positioning, namely the high-end series Kindle Oasis, which costs about 2500 yuan, and the Highest-selling mid-range series Kindle Paperwhite, which sells thousands of yuan.
(Source: Screenshot of the official flagship store of JD Kindle)
According to the "Finance world" weekly consultation Jingdong Kindle official self-operated flagship store customer service learned that kindle Oasis has been out of stock for several months, kindle Paperwhite is also out of stock for more than a month or so, the current "kindle youth version should still have a little, but the specific inventory can not be determined, an account can order up to 15 units."
The customer service's explanation for the current large-scale shortage of products in the store is "caused by the lack of cores by the manufacturer". Through the search, the "Finance World" weekly found that Amazon Chinese website did not have Kindle devices for sale, and related products showed that "currently out of stock". However, the supply on Amazon's official website is normal, and only the international version of the new Kindle Paperwhite shows that it is "expected to ship within 4-6 weeks". When Caijing World Magazine changed the shipping address of related Kindle products with normal inventory to a domestic location, the website showed that "the product cannot be shipped to the current delivery location".
Combined with Amazon's previous closure of the Kindle Tmall official flagship store in October 2021 and the laying off of the Kindle hardware team, these seem to indicate that Amazon may not operate its own Kindle electronic device business in China in the future. The market has also speculated that the closure of its JD.com flagship store "may only be a matter of time".
But before that, the Kindle product hadn't made any waves on social media for a long time. The last time it caused a heated discussion on Weibo was when its Tmall flagship store typed the advertising slogan of "Cover Kindle, face is more fragrant" in 2019.
In addition to its function as a "cover bubble noodle artifact", has the Kindle been "forgotten" by the public?
Once a phenomenal "reading artifact"
Initially, Amazon didn't expect the Kindle's momentum.
In an era when all hardware devices were desperate to be fully armed and used to attract consumers with all the features, no one thought about the use of this bland tablet that could only be used for reading.
In 2007, Amazon's first Kindle was officially released in the fall of that year. Despite selling for $399 at the time, it sold out in just a few hours, which gave Amazon a shot in the arm. Subsequently, Amazon gradually updated the function and form of the Kindle, from physical buttons to touch screens, from thick and thin to thin, and the price gradually returned to the mass consumption range.
(Source: Visual China)
The popularity of the Kindle has given readers around the world a new way of reading - e-book reading. Amazon founder Bezos has publicly stated that the Kindle reader is of great importance to Amazon. It is not just a reader, but an important layout of the entire Amazon book and image market.
This product has created one miracle after another for Amazon. Just 3 years after its launch, Amazon, the world's largest online book retailer, surpassed traditional print book sales for the first time, and the Kindle became the most sold gift in the site's history.
But the real wait until the Kindle entered the Chinese market was already in 2013. Under the thousands of calls, the strong consumption power of the domestic reading group has not disappointed Amazon. In just three years, China officially surpassed the United States to become Amazon's largest market for global Kindle device sales.
In 2018, Kindle once occupied more than 65% of the market share in the domestic e-book field. According to the "China National Reading Report" released by Amazon China in the same year, people's acceptance of electronic books continues to rise: 55% of respondents said that in the past year, they read both paper books and e-books; while the proportion of people who only read e-books was only 19%, an increase of 15 percentage points over the previous year; post-90s and post-00s became the main consumer groups, accounting for 82% and 85% of the people who often paid for e-books.
The Kindle was also once synonymous with e-readers. This also allows Amazon to have the confidence to compete with Apple and Samsung in the consumer electronics market. However, in addition to the huge contribution to Amazon's revenue, the greater significance of the Kindle product is that it is epoch-making in changing the reading habits of the public.
"It takes a single function to the extreme, making reading a pure and convenient thing." Chen You said, "Many of my friends around me have developed the habit of reading after buying a Kindle and after leaving school. ”
"Although I still maintain the habit of reading paper books, I still get used to choosing kindles during my usual commuting and business trips." Chen You sighed, "It's just that the types of books you choose are different. Paper books may buy more difficult tool books, or books that really feel collectible will be bought back, and some easy-to-read books that you usually like will be put on the Kindle. If I really can't buy books on Amazon in the future, I will feel sorry. ”
The unenterprising Kindle
But the Kindle is also already in the fierce competition of the domestic e-reader market.
In the early days, Hanwang Technology once knocked on the door of the capital market with its own electric paper books, and now, the e-reader market is full of flowers. Dozens of companies, including iFLYTEK, Palm Reading, Aragonite, and Duokan, have poured into the e-reader market and grabbed market share with Kindle.
In the eyes of many users who have purchased Kindle in the past, in recent years, the Kindle can be said to be "not thinking of making progress". As a typical representative of the closed system, Kindle claims to support AZW, MOBI, TXT, PDF, PRC and other formats, but in fact, only AZW and MOBI formats can be perfectly displayed on the Kindle so far, while other formats such as PDF, TXT and other formats with large domestic consumer demand are obviously defective on the Kindle.
"When the Kindle reads, there are often missing words and chapters that are confused." As a graduate student, Li Ming often has to read some literature or PDF documents, "Since about three or four years ago, I have seen that there are many forums or consumer feedback pointing out that Kindle is not friendly to PDF and other format layouts, but it has not been solved; at the same time, the Kindle e-reader is slow to respond, slow to turn pages and other issues are often criticized." At the beginning of 2021, Li Ming hung up his Kindle on idle fish.
In addition to the poor reading experience, Amazon's huge digital book resource advantage is also being impacted. In the past 8 years since entering China, Kindle's publishing partners in China have grown from the initial 100 to nearly 1,000, and the number of e-book selections has increased by dozens of times to more than 700,000 copies. At the beginning of the launch of the Kindle, Amazon deliberately followed Nintendo's example, driving down the price of Kindle hardware, just to attract users and make money by paying for e-book downloads.
However, in the domestic market, most users are not willing to pay for "paid reading e-books".
A user told Caijing Weekly that he had never spent a penny on the Amazon Book Store since he bought the Kindle for five years, and some social platforms even had "tutorials" on how to obtain free Kindle book resources.
At the same time, the emergence of online reading apps such as WeChat Reading has greatly reduced the threshold for reading, and users can easily read anytime and anywhere as long as the mobile phone is in hand. At the same time, they are also subtly changing the reading habits of users.
In the early days of the launch of Apps such as WeChat Reading and NetEase Snail Reading, they were mainly based on the "free" model, which quickly attracted traffic. Faced with a new option that is more convenient than carrying an e-reader and has open resources for free, a large number of consumers have chosen to abandon the Kindle.
At the same time, with the development of the information age, consumers' access to knowledge is becoming more and more fragmented. Entertainment models that have emerged in recent years, such as listening to books and short videos, have gradually occupied most of the time of users.
E-reader manufacturers, through thinner and thinner products, and gradually upgraded software and hardware functions, continue to fit the electronic product habits of Chinese consumers, while online reading apps, through the free model and social attributes, have won more and more readers' favor.
In this case, many people's home Kindle has gradually become a "cover bubble noodle artifact".
According to Amazon's 2020 Reading for All report data, the number of readers reading e-books and paper books at the same time has dropped from 55% in 2018 to 46%. According to the National Reading Survey of the China Press and Publication Research Institute, in 2018, 20.8% of adults read on e-readers, while in 2020, only 8.6% of the population used e-readers.
In 2020, the scale of China's book retail market was 97.08 billion yuan, showing negative growth for the first time, down 5.08% year-on-year. Among them, children's, social science, teaching aids, and literary and art books account for about 85.95% of the total book sales. The remaining tens of billions of yuan are for paper books and e-books to be divided together. "Under fierce competition, the Kindle can't keep up with the times, embrace change, and it's only a matter of time before it's been fucked." One consumer said.
But for Amazon, since it officially entered the Chinese market in 2004 with the acquisition of Excellence.com for $75 million, its market share in the domestic e-commerce industry once reached 15.4%. But later, with the rise of local e-commerce platforms such as Ali and JD.com, Amazon's market share began to decline. In Terms of Amazon's Cloud Computing Business (AWS), its market share is also not ideal.
Nowadays, if Amazon's fist product Kindle ushers in a "great retreat" in the domestic market, its story in China will become more and more difficult to tell.
(At the request of the interviewees, Chen You and Li Ming are pseudonyms)
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.