Is the Kindle really "cold"? What has changed in our reading in the electronic age?
Follow the "hardcore book club" and let's talk about the things related to reading. (There are benefits at the end of the article)
The e-book Kindle, which once reformed the way of reading, has recently been rumored to withdraw from the Chinese market, which has attracted a lot of attention and discussion.
From the "reading artifact" to the "bubble noodle artifact", in the mobile phone reading fully conquered the e-reading market and the "revival" of paper books, kindle seems to have become an embarrassing existence.
But in any case, the discussion about the Kindle can rush to 310 million views, which always shows that we are still a little concerned about "reading". Feel free to share your thoughts with us, there are benefits at the end of this article.
Author | Peach sauce
Edit | Cheng late
On January 4, the first working day of 2022, the topic of "Kindle or withdrawing from the Chinese market" was on the Weibo hot search list. As of 12:00 noon on January 5, the topic had been read by 310 million people.
Amazon China's public data shows that as of 2018, the Cumulative Sales of the Kindle in China were millions of units. Assuming that the Kindle's annual increasing sales volume is hundreds of thousands of units, the number of its Chinese users has not yet reached the tens of millions. With less than ten million users, because an unconfirmed message has received so much attention and discussion, the reason may be that in the minds of many people, Kindle is almost synonymous with e-book readers, but also pinned on their own feelings about reading this life cause.
Therefore, the decline of the Kindle, as the self-proclaimed "die-hard fans of e-books" and the purchase of seven or eight Kindles in succession, but now rarely touch it, but Han Song, a professor at the School of Foreign Chinese of Nanjing University, said, "a bit of a sigh".
From "Reading Artifact" to "Bubble Noodle Artifact"
Popular science author @三蝶紀 used a Weibo to record the evolution of his Kindle from commonly used to idle:
In May 2016, she used the Kindle on the subway to read the Japanese writer Kotaro Isaka's Serenade, and the little boy next to her was reading the Harry Potter novel with the same Kindle; in January 2019, her Kindle was gradually idle, and her mobile phone became the best choice for reading books in fragmented time; in May 2020, "Obviously there are still a bunch of paper books, and there are a bunch of books in the Kindle that I haven't read, but I always have to look for books in the mobile app to read, feeling like a scumbag." Listening to a friend's introduction today can use the Kindle as a clock, and the pro-test can feel that I am more scummy."
Screenshot of the Weibo of popular science author @Three Butterflies
Compared with the Kindle as a clock, its "bubble noodle artifact" terrier spreads more widely. In March 2019, the official Tmall flagship store of Kindle (which closed at the end of October 2020) used the self-deprecating copy of "Cover Kindle, Face Is More Fragrant" to promote its youth version of the Kindle, so much so that some netizens commented: "Kindle is crazy? Or is it too accurate to position yourself? ”
Self-deprecating promotional copy of the Kindle Tmall official flagship store
Douban network launched the #What kind of written collocation will bring extraordinary instant noodle taste # Topic: UFO fried noodles× "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" - "It only takes two minutes, you can lift the lid to get the answer to life, the universe and everything" (@Zhongyue), remember to manually squeeze the word "42" with minazi after opening the lid; sour radish duck noodle soup × "Love of the City" - "The birds embroidered on the screen are skinned and broken, and the sharp sour smell is stuffed into the soup." Drinking soup, pinching noodles, hot sour gas bubbles up, and the old rental house has become an old Shanghai" (@Ren Wu_); braised beef noodles × "The Silent Majority" - "Look down and eat this noodle that belongs to the majority, read a text, and continue without a word" (@Miss Mary Sue).
Douban topic # What kind of written collocation will bring extraordinary instant noodle flavor #
What about the good "when I first bought it, I swore to read the book well"? Why did the Use of the Kindle gradually become "charge - put - think - no battery - charge - put"?
As Dan Hansong summarized on Weibo, first of all, the evolution of Kindle in functionality is far less than that of brands like BOOX; secondly, the e-book resources that Amazon can provide are overshadowed by platforms such as WeChat Reading. "Kindle Unlimited's books are far less than WeChat books, and the discounts on e-books sold alone are also very small, and probably the cooperation between the publishing houses is not smooth." As a result, even die-hard fans like him gradually abandoned the Kindle.
No matter how ambitious you were to use the Kindle to read well and abandon the Kindle, you may only need a small reason: its data line is not a Type-C interface, and you have to prepare an extra data line for it when you go out.
Be like God, not like you
Yan Feng, a professor at Fudan University's Department of Chinese, who describes himself as an "e-reading addict," wrote "My E-Reading Career" and combed through his own e-reading journey since the 1990s.
In the article, Yan Feng documents a key point in the history of electronic reading: In 1992, the American science fiction writer William Gibson published a long poem called "Agrippa" in electronic form in honor of his dead father.
American science fiction writer William Gibson/wiki
The poem begins with this:
I hesitated
untie
Tie this book to the knot
A black book:
AGRIPPA photo album
Additional albums can be purchased
Produced by Kodak
Black paper
It's like being burned black by time
The long poem is carried by a 3.5-inch floppy disk, each line is encrypted using the RSA algorithm, and the verse slowly rolls across the screen, and after reading it, it destroys itself - in today's parlance, it is "burn after reading". Verses can only be read once, not backwards, as if life is irreversible.
Amazon founder Bezos is said to have seen a business opportunity in this postmodern poetic performance art, claiming that he will launch books with reading deadlines, and when they expire, they cannot be read.
Amazon founder Bezos/Visual China
Sounds cool, but Amazon's first-generation Kindle in 2007 didn't follow that premise. Bezos wanted the Kindle to "make all the people who sell paper books unemployed," and since the target was paper books, the first Kindle design idea was to make readers read traditional books as if they were reading them. Therefore, Yan Feng, their "long-term die-hards in paper books and e-books", when they saw the physical photos of the first generation of Kindle, they couldn't help but laugh, both disappointed by e-books and happy for paper books.
No one dares to say that Bezos does not understand books, but it may be precisely because he loves books too much and understands books too much, he made the first generation of Kindles look like thick spines, violating the aesthetic standards of light and portable in the electronic age. "There is a paradox here: e-books in the digital age must make people feel like traditional books, but they cannot copy the shape of traditional books. That is to say, to be like God, but not to be like. Whoever grasps the true meaning of this can truly own the future of e-books. Yan Feng wrote.
Yan Feng started the first Kindle in order to read best-selling author Dan Brown's new book "The Lost Secret" for the first time. The book was published in the United States in 2009 and released electronically at the same time. Yan Feng, a fan of Dan Brown, ordered a Kindle DX for $489 and bought the electronic version of The Lost Secret for $9.90 on Amazon. In his view, Amazon's e-books use an exclusive and exclusive format, which is inevitable to be suspected of conspiracy theories, but as a consumer who just needs it, "there is no choice but to swallow and accept this monopolistic behavior."
The Lost Secret
Translated by Dan Brown and translated by Zhu Zhenwu et al
99 readers | People's Literature Publishing House, 2010-1
Paper books are not dead
The Kindle and the iPhone are "co-births", both born in 2007. Jobs, apple CEO at the time, looked down on the Kindle, believing it to be a hopeless product," "because there will be fewer and fewer people reading books in the future." The relevant report launched by Newsweek in the United States that year said: "Books are not dead: they are being digitized." ”
In 2010, Amazon's e-book sales surpassed physical books for the first time. It was also in this year that Futurist and author of Digital Survival, Nicolas Negroponte, predicted that in 5 years, paper books would disappear.
However, in 2015, when Negroponte predicted that paper books would disappear, e-books did not kill physical books, on the contrary, the sales of physical books showed an upward momentum.
Nielsen's monitoring data shows that the year-on-year growth rate of physical books in the world's two major book markets, the United Kingdom and the United States, is 3.7% and 2.8%, respectively. The 2016 Survey of American Reading Habits released by the Pew Research Center also shows that the proportion of readers who read paper books, e-books and audiobooks is 65%, 28%, and 14%, respectively.
2016 Survey of American Reading Habits/ Pew Research Center
This is also the current reading ecology: paper, electricity, and listening coexist. Which books are suitable for electronic reading and which books are suitable for physical reading, different readers have different opinions. For example, the complete collection of Jin Yong novels is suitable for making e-books, easy to carry, and the price is cheaper; "big books" such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude", some readers firmly believe that they must not be read on the e-book reader, they must read physical books, otherwise they will have no feelings.
Young people, represented by millennials, pay more attention to the sociability of reading. In their view, exchanging books in book groups, attending lectures and sharing activities in bookstores and libraries is an act of sharing wisdom and promoting the collision of ideas.
Eslite Life Suzhou Store/Visual China
In Japan, there is a bookstore called "Bunya" that collects tickets. It belongs to the Japanese publishing and sales group, opened in 2018, and the ticket price is 1500 yen (about 83.5 yuan), and the cost of following the movie theater is about the same. After paying the entrance fee, customers can read more than 30,000 books in the store at will, and the bookstore not only provides free coffee, but also sells light meals to meet the needs of customers' physical and mental needs.
"If you want to buy a book on the website and search, all that appears are books that are filtered out based on your purchase history. It's all a continuation of your past self. Although you can find books that interest you in the shortest possible time, you will not come across books in areas that you are not interested in. And if you look for a book in a bookstore, you will spend energy and time. When you take a book from a bookshelf, you tend to quickly glance at the book that is sitting next to it. That may be the door that opens the new world. Bookstores are similar to 'treasure hunts for gold', where the experience is something that online searches can't give. In an interview with Japan's Mainichi Shimbun, Japanese publishing and sales group book selection engineer Kazuchi said so.
In order to make the bookstore a treasure hunt for customers, the practice of "eating literature" is not to place books according to the category of books, such as placing cooking guides under architecture-related books, deliberately confusing customers; in addition, each book only puts one sample book, if someone is reading the book, others can't read it, and it is all luck to want to read what books.
It is said that customers who enter the "wen eat" generally stay for three or four hours, and 30% of customers buy books when they leave the store.
Therefore, the most important thing is to maintain the habit of reading and thinking, without having to worry about how to read, where to read, and what to use.
Today's topic
Do you have a habit of using your Kindle?
Do you prefer paper books or e-books?
· END ·
Author 丨 Peach Sauce
Editor 丨Cheng late
Proofreading | Yang Chao