Although Amazon China has debunked the rumors, the news of Kindle's withdrawal from China is still spreading. The once-glorious Kindle and Amazon, the American superpowers, seem to be able to re-enter the Chinese public's field of vision only when similar events occur.
There are endless Kindle terriers at the top of the network
A variety of Kindle models have a large area of shortage in the mainland, even if it is really only because of "insufficient chip production capacity", it can not hide its lonely situation in China - Amazon's Chinese e-commerce business in recent years has continued to adjust and lay off, the team is "optimizing", and the Kindle has been reduced to a "cover bubble face artifact".
"Why only Chinese don't love to read" and other voices are also raging again, in some netizens lamented where to go to find cracked e-books in the future, there are many people who are distressed, "Why can't The Kindle only survive here", "We are indeed a cultural desert here"...
Perhaps the overall cultural consumption of the Chinese people is still far from satisfactory, but this is probably not directly causal to do with whether the Kindle withdraws from China.
On the contrary, Kindle has always been the dominant company in the Chinese publication e-book and e-reader market, and has always occupied the highest share.
However, Kindle's own software and hardware problems are many, compared with the sinking digital reading market with a larger user base and more use scenarios, the market space is extremely limited, and the publication e-book business and ecology based on Kindle hardware cannot replicate the business model of European and American hardware concessions and knowledge services profitability in China, which is the reason why Kindle's overall performance in China is not satisfactory.
Leaving aside the sentiment component, Kindle's withdrawal from the Chinese mainland market may only be a matter of time.
The Kindle is really not easy to use, if it can still be considered useful
Among the top ten useless goods in 2021 selected by Idle Fish last year, "a relatively expensive instant noodle periphery" ranked third in the minesweeper list, and only the air fryer and treadmill were more unpopular with users than it.
"A relatively expensive instant noodle peripheral" ranks third in the minesweeper list
Some Kindle advocates, while lamenting the decline of the world, may have consciously or unconsciously overlooked the fact that:
The Kindle is really not easy to use, if it can still be considered useful.
A smartphone with multiple functions can also be used as a reading terminal. At the beginning of the development of the Kindle, Amazon considered how to face the challenge of smartphones.
Battery life used to be a major feature of the Kindle, but this advantage can be said to be lost today. As an "extension of human organs" in this era, no one can allow mobile phones to run out of power for even a moment.
Therefore, in terms of hardware, the only advantage of the Kindle is the ink screen that claims to simulate the display effect on real paper, read for a long time without tired eyes, and is more suitable for outdoor environments.
But for people who have already opted for electronic screen reading, not getting tired of the eyes is obviously not a broad strong demand. There are not many scenes suitable for outdoor reading, but there are many alternative options, if the reader wants to read a book in depth and carefully in the travel or café, why not take the book directly?
Today's tablets, especially smart mobile devices, the price has dropped to the range of thousands of yuan, in addition to reading, but also can provide social, photography, video and other just needed functions, single function Of the Kindle disadvantage is obvious.
Bezos is not without thinking about this problem, in his view, smartphones will mainly be used for fragmented reading, and the immersive long-term deep reading service that can provide readers should be the main feature of Kindle. "Simulating real paper display" and "eyes not tired", including "undisturbed attentive reading experience", are all part of the immersive deep reading experience. But the core positioning of this Kindle — the unique immersive and deep reading experience that the phone doesn't have— is actually something it simply can't provide.
Not to mention that the ink screen itself is almost unable to withstand bumps, easy to damage, and can only achieve black and white gray color effect, in the face of many color books, it has been powerless; the Kindle system has also led to the reading speed of e-books, page speed and so on are disasters.
In addition to the special mobi format, Kindle can not support all kinds of mainstream e-book formats on the market, such as epub.
What's more, e-books are a reconstructed way of reading in another information medium. Because of the change of medium, the text information of the paper book is encoded and rearranged, so the e-book has different characteristics from the traditional paper book, such as at the formal level, readers can adjust the font size and layout according to their own preferences.
But also because of the limitations of the medium of screen, e-books are destined to have many bad reading experiences. For example, because paper books are easy to turn pages back and forth, positioning, footnotes and endnotes, this traditional form is quite suitable for paper books, but on e-books, it seems that the reading experience is quite unfriendly.
Today's well-made e-books have been improved to enable two-way links that can be jumped back and forth between the body and the comment position by clicking on the chapter, the annotation label, and the comment. But the development of technologies like these is not the result of e-books becoming more realistic. On the contrary, because of the tradition of paper books and the paper books of the Kindle content providers, the paper books are produced first and electronically in the back, so e-books must solve some of the chronic diseases caused by the inability to be realistic, and in the existing content arrangement form of paper books, their own reading experience is far inferior to that of paper books.
Another kind of "e-book" that we often read on the PC every day, such as PDF, PDG and other formats, although it is also digital, but the e-book scanned by page of this kind of paper book is actually fundamentally different from the Kindle e-book. This kind of scanned paper book is likely to be the rigid demand for in-depth reading of screen publications, and it is also a more appropriate and meaningful form of content for screen realism.
Therefore, Kindle's most focused slogan " back to paper reading " is also Amazon's biggest advantage of ink screens for computers and mobile phone LED screens, which is actually completely opposite, and it can even be said that this is a lie.
Is the Kindle really compared to a domestic reader?
Even in the Kindle's most highly valued reading experience, it now seems that people generally believe that it has no advantage over domestic readers. Nowadays, at all price points in the market, there are already e-readers whose reading experience is not weaker than that of Kindle, such as high-end Aragonite, iFLYTEK, low-end palm reading, millet, etc. They are mostly open Android systems, which can support a variety of formats, the system is not much easier to use than the Kindle, and even have products with color screen displays. And their ink screen technology is almost indistinguishable from the Kindle, because the ink screens all over the world are the same, and only Taiwan Yuan tai has the ability to carry out mature research and development and mass production.
The netizens' evaluation of the Kindle reading experience may reflect the current general view to a certain extent.
But the paradox is that even in China, Kindle still occupies the highest market share of e-readers all year round, and the various readers that may have only advantages over Kindle in terms of price and reading experience are actually not competitors in the eyes of Kindle, and their sales and market share are not worth mentioning at all.
It's not just because of Kindle's first-mover brand advantage. In fact, most readers have completely misunderstood the main sales form and object of the Kindle, so they will come up with the absurd conclusion that the Kindle has completely failed the domestic reader brand, thus withdrawing from the Chinese market.
Although it is impossible to accurately check the sales of the Kindle from the official source, according to some official public information, it can be confirmed that the Kindle has accumulated millions of units since entering China in 2013, and in 2016, China has become the largest sales market for Kindle hardware, and it is reasonable to speculate that the annual sales of Kindle China should be hundreds of thousands to millions of units.
However, the number of second-hand Kindles on sale on salted fish alone is 400,000 units. The Kindle is an industrial mass-produced electronic device, not a blind box that needs to rely on over-the-counter market speculation, or a collectible that can preserve value.
This seems to indicate that a significant percentage of former users have abandoned the Kindle, switched to other reading devices or returned to the arms of paper books. But there are some more crucial secrets that simply data simply can't reflect.
Even Kindle's engineers "didn't understand the reader's functional positioning" and pricing strategy.
The sales figures of the Kindle, which are not low, are actually not contributed by ordinary reading enthusiasts or individual consumers who really want to use kindle reading.
Contrary to the public's perception, what kindle has entered and painstakingly operated in the mainland is actually a gift market with unlimited space. The most important source of Customers of Kindle is all kinds of enterprises and institutions, and their bulk customized procurement is the main sales channel of Kindle.
Because the Kindle is designated as a gift, it is even more impossible to reduce the price, but to maintain its own high-priced gift image, which may also be the fundamental reason why the stock of kindles in the second-hand market is so huge.
Then, it is only natural that more than half of the Kindles have never been opened again after they have been sold. How can it not become a kind of "cover bubble noodle artifact"?
Knowing this sad fact, and then looking at the data on salted fish, we may come to an even sadder conclusion, that is, the Kindle, or e-reader, is a product that can almost meet the market demand by relying on the stock supply of the second-hand market.
Is the Kindle really defeated by the piracy environment?
Both in the East and the West, Gutenberg printing and engraving printing are one of the most important technologies for mankind to enter modern civilization. In the nearly thousand years since they began to be used on a large scale, paper has been the most important material carrier for human interactive information.
For the first time since the beginning of the digital and Internet era at the end of the last century, the most important position of paper and paper books in information carriers has been challenged. E-books are not limited by space and materials, can be copied indefinitely at no cost, and their prospects seem to be vast.
However, in 2004, when Bezos was ambitiously planning the development of an e-book reader, he was met with unanimous opposition and ridicule from both inside and outside.
Among the opponents are even a number of Amazon executives, who believe that e-book readers will affect the paper book retail business that Amazon relies on, and it is purely their own life. In the eyes of outsiders, for example, Jobs thinks that the Kindle is a boring and single-function electronic product. The failure of Sony and Google to develop e-readers has also proved that the business of e-readers is probably not so easy to do.
But before Kodak learned, Bezos knew that Amazon could not repeat the mistakes of film for digital cameras, and his instructions to the R&D team were: Your goal is to "make everyone who sells paper books unemployed." As the world's number one book and audio-visual retailer at that time, Amazon was probably the most suitable company to transform the traditional paper book market.
The digital ecology created by Apple relying on iPod and iTunes has made Bezos firm in his Kindle strategy. In fact, as early as a hundred years ago, the famous razor company Gillette was already playing this set.
The traditional combination of razors and blades is more expensive, and few people are willing to buy them, so they sell the razors themselves separately at a loss, but a knife holder has to change an average of 25 blades a year, so blade sales and overall profits are rising.
Gillette relied on this trick to become the world's largest brand of shaving care. This "knife holder + blade" business model can greatly reduce the first input cost of consumers, and then rapidly expand the consumer group. More and more people are being held in captivity and can make money by relying on other additional services.
Sega, Sony, Nintendo Microsoft have used the same means to have fought many wonderful battles. At the first E3 show in 1995, the moment when the four words of 299$ helped Sony detonate the venue and win the console war have long been fixed as a classic moment in the history of games and business.
The Kindle, which has almost no hardware profits, is also shouldering the responsibility of building Amazon's digital reading ecosystem. Users will only make a series of purchases in the Kindle Marketplace after purchasing a Kindle. This is Amazon's hardware profit + knowledge service profit business model in Europe and the United States.
And it's not enough to just keep your eyes on the user. Bezos's ambition is to transform the traditional publishing industry from production to distribution. Authors no longer need to sign up for publishing companies as before, Amazon can talk about royalties directly with authors, books no longer need to be displayed on the shelves of bookstores, and the Kindle itself is the largest, a bridge between authors and readers. Not only will people's study time be occupied by Kindle, but the traditional book publishing and distribution channels will also be replaced by Amazon.
Because of this, The Kindle's system must be exclusive and closed, and Amazon will make a profit by this, and it will also build its own ecological closed loop and business empire.
But the situation in China is very different from that in Europe and the United States. Intellectual property awareness is relatively weak, all kinds of content products have long been victims of piracy, and the long-term lag in legal protection has also made the cost of piracy low and the cost of rights protection high, so kindle's subsequent knowledge service profit will be difficult.
However, on websites such as Library Genesis and various English-language closed book forums, there are also a large number of free accessible resources for English books during the copyright period.
In fact, in addition to e-books, in China's online text, knowledge payment and other digital reading fields, there have also been a large number of piracy situations for a long time, as long as you are willing to do it, whether it is in a treasure, or the use of some search tools, you can easily bypass the copyright party's paywall and get low-cost or free copyright content products. But some industries have not died at the hands of piracy, on the contrary, there have been new players who have squeezed their heads and want to come in and get a piece of the pie.
Moreover, digital e-books themselves have the characteristics of unlimited reproduction at no cost, and compared with genuine copies, piracy has almost no difference in content experience. When consumers buy (in fact, rent) Kindle digital content products, they do not have the same sense of physical possession as they can buy physical books.
Therefore, the piracy environment is actually not the main reason why Amazon China is difficult to build a digital reading ecology.
Reading online texts with mobile phones, can it be called reading?
At present, China's book retail market is about 100 billion yards, 70 billion to 80 billion real yang, and in recent years and the foreseeable future, it may be difficult to have significant growth. In contrast, the publication e-book market is actually very small, about one-twentieth of the size of paper books.
And publication e-books have a much stronger Matthew effect than paper books, and sales are more concentrated in a small number of head hits, but even so, some publishing institutions with popular literature as the main category on the market may only account for about 5% of total revenue, let alone others.
But The size of China's digital reading market is already half that of the book market. At first glance, it may seem surprising why is the publication e-book market so small, but the digital reading market so large?
In fact, the main content category of the digital reading market is online text. From the beginning and longitude of the PC era to the reading, palm reading and book flag of the mobile era, the market share of these traditional subscription-based online text platforms has been growing rapidly before 2018.
In 2018, the rise of short video platforms robbed a large number of original digital reading users, especially primary and secondary school students, and the growth of traditional online text platforms began to slow down significantly, and a new model of online text appeared - the free online text platform represented by rice reading, tomato, seven cats, etc. began to develop rapidly.
It is worth mentioning that because of the name of Zhihu "Knowledge Community", the market often regards it as a knowledge payment service. But in fact, zhihu salt selection and "knowledge" basic eight rods can not be beaten, the main content is different from the traditional hundreds of millions of words of online text of all kinds of short stories, mainly romance, suspense, content distribution form is quite similar to several years of Baidu tieba bar.
These online text companies are actually the main force of digital reading in the mainland, and most of them also have publications and e-book businesses, but this revenue can only account for about 5% of the company's overall revenue.
Compared with publication e-books and even the knowledge payment that was popular a while ago, online text is a digital reading business that has been proven profitable by the market.
The way to convert free online advertisements is more complicated, and it is not the focus of this article, interested readers can refer to the Qing Fifteen "Free Novel Market Crowd Competition, Who Can Win the Central Plains?" " article.
Late free online text platforms seem to have no content sales revenue, but in fact, after attracting users by content and delivery, they can sell third-party advertisements at high prices on their own platforms, which is essentially a business of reselling traffic and earning the difference in advertising revenue.
The cost structure and cost model of Netwen Company have undergone precise calculations. Free online text platforms may be basically equivalent to the income of traditional subscription or membership-based online text platforms, and the revenue they can share with creators is basically equivalent to that of traditional subscription network texts.
In addition to subscriptions, memberships, and advertisements, the content they buy can also be derivative development of copyrights, such as film and television, peripherals, etc., and the related revenue has generally accounted for more than 30% of the total revenue of the platform.
The quality of these content may be unbearable, aimed at the sinking market of online texts, on the screen can provide readers with a "sense of immersion", in fact, can be much stronger than the Kindle.
Let's take a brief account of my own personal experience. I once accidentally boarded a thief ship that was "quite knowledgeable" in public perception, looked like a knowledge payment business, but was actually a network literary organization, and the task was to produce historical military content.
Colleagues who are familiar with romance novels, after a cursory glance at the reference book "Ancient Wars" provided by me, only awkwardly sighed that "it seems that the users of mobile phone reading are still completely different from the readers of paper books" and "Our main users are middle school students, you have to think about what they can read." Later, I suddenly realized that they were actually standing on the perspective of online texts, so the understanding of historical knowledge content was actually just online stories with historical backgrounds.
Yuan Tingdong's book "Ancient Wars" is of good quality, and in the paper book, it is a historical book that is biased towards popular science and general knowledge, and is by no means a purely professional academic research work that is unfathomable and can only be read by researchers.
The reader's digital reading scene is actually completely different from that of paper book reading. When the reader chooses to open a paper book, it has been circled by the exact closed content, and we will be in a state of flow that needs to continue to read the closed content of our choice.
But digital reading is open. In this kind of reading scene, there are often several paragraphs of text content in a mobile phone screen that cannot continue to stimulate the reader's strong interest in reading down, and the reader only needs to flick his finger and has jumped out and swiped to the next content. The subscription, membership conversion or advertising costs that the online text platform relies on for profit have also been adrift.
Because of this, mainstream online texts basically have a type of writing routine, such as three paragraphs to explain the background, a thousand words a small turn, do not allow complex character relationships, knowledge preparation, otherwise readers will stop and think and so on.
Although the content quality of the content produced in this way of writing is often extremely low, it is basically unbearable for readers with certain reading literacy, but for the wider group of primary and secondary school students and sinking market users, these contents can naturally provide a higher sense of immersion, and even addiction. The reading immersion caused by online texts is much stronger than the content of The Kindle's electronic paper book publications, which were originally used for paper book publishing.
In essence, the level of reading immersion is actually mainly related to the production logic of the content, and it has little to do with whether the terminal device has superfluous functions to disturb the reader's reading.
And in China, it is the knowledge payment company that makes beautiful promises such as killing the traditional publishing industry and giving authors higher royalties.
The main difference between knowledge payment and digital reading is the content form, because the distribution channels of knowledge payment nowadays, Himalaya, Dragonfly, B Station, including getting, etc. are all audio and video platforms, so the mainstream of knowledge payment products is audio form.
Under the strict review mechanism, although the content forms of online text and knowledge payment have been affected by certain supervision, such as online articles with folklore and superstition as the background have been banned by the relevant departments, but compared with the publication of paper books, its supervision is still very relaxed.
Therefore, in Europe and the United States, Amazon can directly cut into the upstream content and copyright side to some extent, but it is difficult in China. Upstream publishers in China are often also not active in the electronicization of content.
A considerable part of them are not purely market-oriented, and even if they are market-oriented, there are situations where the sales of publications and e-books interact with paper books, and the revenue is very limited, and naturally they have no intention of deepening this field.
Amazon China had such a conclusion many years ago: compared with China's local e-commerce, its entire self-operated category has no cost and efficiency advantages. Therefore, its business focus has always been global purchase, and the paper book sales business has long been shut down.
While Kindle has always been a big player in the e-reader market, publication e-books aren't a good business compared to online articles. There is no profitable service payment model, Kindle must maintain a high hardware price in China for various reasons, and it is difficult to enter the sinking market and industrial upstream of digital reading, which is simply a European and American hardware concessions, knowledge services profitable, creating an ecological reverse "flywheel effect", the business will only become more and more difficult to do.
Therefore, Kindle's withdrawal from the Chinese market may be inevitable, but it is only a matter of time and time.
As for the poor status quo and mud of China's digital reading market, we should not be less pessimistic. In fact, there are not many "waste paper" with extremely low value in paper books, as long as we firmly believe that we have the ability to judge the quality of content, and are willing to pursue those really good content, it is enough. As for reading a paper book, a Kindle, or a cell phone, it may not matter that much.