In the Kindle, there is no future of reading.
At the end of 2021, a well-known second-hand trading platform released the list of "Top Ten Useless Commodities of the Year", and "e-readers" ranked 3rd. In the first week of the new year, the Kindle, synonymous with e-readers, was not very elegant on the hot search.
Amazon China's official website has no products in stock, and Jingdong's self-operated stores are out of stock in a large area... When the discussion of "Kindle or exit from the Chinese market" intensified, Amazon China quickly gave a side response: "We are committed to serving Chinese consumers, and consumers can purchase Kindle devices through third-party online and offline retailers." ”
There is news that the out-of-stock is due to the shortage of chips, and the current Kindle's e-book mall is also operating normally, and users can still place orders to buy books. But in this round of turmoil, netizens found that Kindle's official Taobao flagship store had closed as early as last year's Double Eleven, and according to Shell Finance, Amazon China's Kindle hardware team had been laid off in November last year.
Kindle's life in the Chinese market is indeed not very good. For most users, this electronic product is always "flexible employment" on weekdays, and is ridiculed as a "bubble noodle lid", which is accompanied by dust by default.
The last time Kindle's hot search had to be traced back to 2019, when the official use of "Cover Kindle, face is more fragrant" as an advertising slogan, people can't help but feel that Kindle seems to have given up self-treatment long ago.
Compete for "attention"
The emergence of the Kindle itself was a counter-trend move.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos writes letters to the company's shareholders every year, and unlike the cold annual report, his words often have some sincere thoughts. In a letter from 15 years ago, Bezos explained the original intention of developing the Kindle in an "almost missionary tone": humans and tools co-evolved, we change tools, and then tools change us. Laptops and mobile phones make us more inclined to eat "information snacks", and the Kindle is specially designed for long text reading.
It was the days of Nokia and BlackBerry, and smart portable devices, though limited in functionality, were already impacting the frequency and way people received information. Bezos cherished the efficiency they brought, but "didn't want to read a three-hundred-page document on it." Kindles, on the other hand, offer a balance in the electronic tide of fragmented information, "transporting people into a world with a longer attention span."
Naturally, there are also commercial considerations. Sony launched the ink screen reader Librie as early as 2004, and Apple created a new music sales ecology by relying on the connection of the iPod to iTunes. Amazon had the largest e-commerce platform for books, DVDs, and albums at the time, but it didn't have matching hardware. Bezos firmly believes that the book business is on the verge of transformation, and Amazon will do it if it doesn't do anything else.
Lab126 lab was set up, team members were asked to treat new products with an entrepreneurial mindset, and the person in charge was instructed that "your goal is to make all the people who sell paper books unemployed." Within the project team, the Kindle's code name is "Fiona"—the name comes from The Diamond Age—and the character in the novel has a machine that brings together all of humanity's library and knowledge.
The first Kindle came out in 2007, 5 months before it went on sale on the iPhone 1. Jobs was very unoptimistic about the Kindle, once taunting that "this is a product with no hope."
But in the short term, the kindle's approach to paper book reading experience made it difficult for a smartphone with a screen of only 3.5 inches at the time, and the portability of one-handed holding, the capacity of 88,000 books and the low price of $9.99 a book quickly captured the hearts of countless readers.
The first kindle
The first-generation Kindle sold for $399 (about 2,500 yuan) and sold out within 6 hours. With the advantages of equipment and the support of copyright libraries, Amazon has gradually become a leader in the reader industry. However, the huge market on the other side of the ocean will not be until 6 years later.
When Kindle decided to enter China, a large number of reports presented that the voices in the industry were "not optimistic", and a more representative view was that if it entered China before the iPad, the business development might be much better. For domestic users, e-book readers are not new, Hanwang seized the wind in 2010, after the stock market was listed, the stock price once rose to more than 170 yuan per stick, and then founder, patriot, Newman and other dozens of companies have entered the game, there is a great trend of the deer.
However, at that time, manufacturers mainly sold readers as pure hardware, which was not the same as Amazon, which had its own massive resources. On the other hand, although domestic digital reading originated from online literature in the 90s, over the years, the traditional serious publishing institutions did not participate too much in digitization, when the most important distribution channel for e-books of various publishing houses was China Mobile, digital publishing accounted for a very low proportion of revenue, and the e-reader market was actually a wild wilderness. In 2012, Hanwang's annual operating profit was negative 13.88 million yuan.
Amazon has made sufficient advance preparations, the most important of which is to cooperate with domestic book copyright owners to let each other accept their own "omni-channel lowest price" and "45:55" sharing rules. When the Kindle went public, there were hundreds of state-run publishing houses and private publishing companies that Amazon cooperated with in China, and half a year later, the sales of e-books in the online mall increased by 3 times year-on-year.
In 2013, kindle entered China
Despite the difficulties of running-in, Kindle has won the domestic market, and the reason for its success is no different from when it subverted the North American publishing industry: convenient, cheap, and massive resources. More importantly, at a time when the 3G to 4G node and the mobile Internet began to become popular, Kindle provided a "longer attention span" illusion for people who were increasingly anxious about information fragmentation.
"Serious people who take the bubble noodle cover to read books"
By the end of 2016, China had become kindle's largest sales market in the world. During this period, Amazon's China team also made a number of localization attempts, such as based on Chinese women's preferences for color, and launched a white Kindle in China after many years.
The only feature of the Kindle is both its biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage.
Heavy user Zhang Qi used it almost every day after purchase, kindle frequently appeared in commuter subway, travel plane, bedside before bed, etc., as short as half an hour long to a day, over time she became dependent on the reading effect of the ink screen, if not necessarily used any other equipment to read long text. The immersion provided by Kindle is also of great significance, she told Poison Eye: "The mobile phone has too many functions, and I can't help but cut out to return to WeChat and read Weibo." The Kindle, like Lego and Jigsaw Puzzle, allows me to go hours without looking at my phone, and I need this time when I don't receive information at all. ”
Kindle has largely shaped the reading habits of such users, but for more users, there is no relationship between a piece of hardware and reading habits. Li Long once spent 599 yuan to buy the basic Kindle during college, and also used it to read serious books such as "Journey to the West" and "Eight Social Trends in Contemporary China", but it was not long before the Kindle ushered in the fate of "eating ashes". "It's not a solid habit, and it's hard to pick it up after a break. The app in the mobile phone is embedded, it is very natural to pick up, and later an app can integrate multiple small programs, so why bring one more piece of hardware? The Kindle is too cost-effective as a digital product. ”
Single functionality also means that it is highly replaceable, and mobile phones with larger and larger screens and equally portable tablets can squeeze their market share. In addition, natural defects such as slow ink screen refresh and inability to display color graphics and text will also become a reason for a group of users to reject the Kindle.
The need to read serious publications is itself a niche demand. According to the "Reading Industry Development Report (2017)", even in the high-light period of the Kindle, the size of the domestic online literature market at that time was 4.5 times the size of the e-book market. Moreover, Kindle also "picks books", difficult readings that need to be annotated or reference books that need to be consulted frequently are not suitable for it, and the exquisite screen only reproduces black and white paper, but does not really build an "electronic library".
So in more situations, kindle plays a trendy single role, if friends love to read, send a Kindle is not wrong, according to different hobbies This gift can also be a watch, camera or Bluetooth speaker, it is no longer a practical tool for reading, just a hollow symbol of reading. Behind more customization and joint models, it is also a helpless embodiment of this functional shift. For example, in 2017, the "joint gift box" cooperated with the Forbidden City designed 4 special protective covers according to the Collection of the Forbidden City, and in the official promotion copy, the packaging box is also the same as the Kindle and protective cover contained in it, which is a commodity.
Of course, the Kindle has a more well-known function: the instant noodle cover. Users who abandon the Kindle know that buying "impractical" symbols will not really bring reading habits, but can only add a few strands of book fragrance to the bubble noodles. Under the relevant answer of Zhihu, there is no shortage of consumers who use a rigorous attitude of reading textbooks to argue that kindle is really suitable for covering instant noodles: its weight of 200 grams can ensure that it is tight and will not deform the noodle barrel, the waterproof performance is better than that of the iPad, and the right size looks pleasing to the eye...
When the slogan of "Cover Kindle, Face More Fragrant" appears on the home page of Tmall and the bus stop signs of some cities at the same time, it actually represents the end of the way for this product to obtain incremental users, and can only be combined with gimmicks that are not actual functions to attract attention. Kindle's official public account has also played "instant noodle terrier" more than once, a tweet has sorted out the "instant noodle book list", with a witty tone to write the classic braised beef noodles and the reader-tested "Ordinary World", "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" and so on, and the pork bone ramen should be accompanied by Japanese literature such as "Chrysanthemum and Knife" and "Astrology Killing Magic".
Compared with other electronic products, the extremely low iteration requirements of the Kindle are also an important reason for the difficulty of hardware sales. Zhang Qi said: "There is no memory, function and other factors that make people want to change it, this thing is not bad, I can use it for 20 years." And more and more users will find that the "bubble cover" gradually becomes a fact from a joke, and the second-hand trading market has become its final belonging. Since August 2019, the turnover of the Kindle has exceeded 400,000 units in one year, and amazon e-commerce has just withdrawn from China that year, and the Kindle business left behind has quickly proved to be almost forming an "internal cycle" between users and users.
Text | Liao Yizhou
Edit | Zhao Ordinary