Success is also immersed, and failure is also immersed. Even with device or system replacements, the Kindle is always just a reader.
This article is reproduced from interesting report (ID:youyisi_cn)
Wen | gifts
"Am I going to lose the smell of books?!"
On the first working day of 2022, #Kindle or exit the Chinese market #appeared on Weibo's hot search.
According to the insider to the interesting report, the Amazon Kindle department has planned to dissolve as early as mid-2021, and has been steadily advancing step by step so far, and the relevant personnel have received substantial compensation or corresponding arrangements.
In the face of this farewell that has not been publicized in advance and has not yet dared to boldly announce officially, people who love Kindle feel sorry, and people who have covered the bubble noodles go to the corner to dig out their Own Kindle to charge and remember, passers-by only feel doubtful, quit and quit, what is the big deal?
White moonlight with instant noodle cover
Teacher Yao, who is engaged in the protection of cultural heritage, likes to read science fiction and historical novels in his spare time, and he often has millions of words. He and his wife have had nearly twenty Kindles over the years, either for their own use or giving away.
Hearing that Kindle was going to quit the Chinese market, he bought a spare one at Idle Fish that night, "and it was also prepared for his son." After all, the Kindle is too much like a physical book, and it is more convenient than a physical book. ”
Since the e-reader entered daily life, the Kindle, which is topped with a black and gray ink screen, is a name that cannot be bypassed. It is the white moonlight of book lovers, the red rose of the bubble noodle party.
In 1997, E-ink developed "electronic paper", but in the subsequent decade of development, commercial e-readers have not been recognized by the market. Until 2007, Amazon released its first Kindle, priced at $399 (about 3,000 yuan at the current year's exchange rate), and sold out in 5 and a half hours.
Facing readers all over the world, Kindle successfully completed a cognitive reconstruction: although it does not have the substance of a book and the real feeling of turning pages, it can pack hundreds of books in its pocket and harvest a pleasant visual experience like reading a newspaper.
According to IDC, global e-reader sales rose to 12.8 million units in 2010, of which 48% were Kindles. Since then, the Kindle has become almost synonymous with e-readers around the world.
To this day, when the well-known American magazine PC Magazine and technology media Digital Trends are selected at the end of the year, Kindle is still ranked as the best of the year in comprehensive strength.
Image source: pcmag.com
The Kindle's glory moment in China came a little later.
In June 2013, Kindle entered China. Although there have long been domestic Hanwang, Founder and other companies involved in the reader market, the Kindle with its own traffic is still in the spotlight, and the sales volume far exceeds expectations. Even consumers who have already tasted the sea have also purchased a national bank for the sake of system and after-sales.
In 2017, Amazon executive David Limp publicly stated that China is kindle's largest market in the world, and the Chinese business maintains double-digit growth every year. As of mid-2018, the Kindle had sold millions of units in China, the total number of users of kindle China increased by 91 times, and the number of monthly active users increased by 69 times.
Since then, the public channel has not disclosed relevant data, but from the Kindle Jingdong self-operated flagship store that only the youth version is currently on sale, it can be seen that the best-selling Kindle paperwhite fourth-generation product has a total number of more than 300,000 reviews of the two colors.
Source: JD.com
Even when Amazon closed its Chinese e-commerce business in 2019, in addition to the overseas purchase part, Kindle has become Amazon's last business in China in the eyes of consumers (there are also mainly TO B's AWS cloud services and other services).
Because of the Kindle, reading it has become more comfortable, convenient, and ubiquitous.
For people who love to read, before commuting, traveling, and going to bed, the Kindle is the best companion outside the mobile phone; even people who do not love to read think that maybe after having a Kindle, you can read a few more books, and the worst can cover the noodles.
Source: Douban
As early as 2016-2017, the legend of the Kindle "bubble cover" was circulated in the jianghu. Its weight, size, and water resistance are really just right.
But when in 2019, even the official itself played the terrier, with the advertising slogan of "cover kindle, more fragrant noodles" as an advertising slogan, trying to attract more young consumers, the chicken rib problem of e-readers became more and more conspicuous.
The official Tmall Kindle flagship store closed in October 2021, when it said it was preparing for a new store.
You're fine, it's just that we don't fit in
The Kindle may indeed be a subversive product for reading habits and even lifestyles, but it is also true that the bubble cover is a stem.
The first place in the 2020 annual idle fish hot word is "half cover bubble noodles and half hang idle fish", and more than 400,000 Kindles are sold on the platform a year, of which nearly 70% of the buyers are young people under the age of 30.
At the end of last year, Idle Fish announced the "Top Ten Useless Commodities of 2021", and Kindle was once again on the list, along with air fryers, treadmills, Palide and so on.
Image source: Idle Fish Official
The high idle rate of the Kindle comes largely from the misjudgment that many young people "buy is equal to read".
The problem is that reading habits are difficult to spontaneously generate due to changes in device or medium, that is, buying a Kindle and reading with a Kindle are two completely unrelated things.
In this regard, the small fish with a "bubble noodle cover" is very touching. She bought the Kindle because it was an immersive reader that would maximize the paper book reading experience. But she usually does not like to read, bought a Kindle and does not have much motivation to read, even before going to bed, she prefers to use her mobile phone to listen to music or podcasts.
Brutally, the Kindle has to fight much more than non-immersive reading, there are more relaxed pastimes. Compared with Douyin, which has exceeded 600 million daily active users, the number of users of kindle is not at all an order of magnitude.
"No matter how moving the advertising story is, the pastime that most people choose after a busy day may not be picking up the Kindle to read." A senior marketing director told interesting reports that even if he owns 7 Kindles, he still wants to brush short videos after high-intensity overtime, or ask friends to have a drink and do something "brainless".
But it's also hard to expect people who read books to feed the Kindle.
Amazon founder Bezos pointed out in interviews early on that the Kindle's monetization comes from the user's continued use, not the first purchase of the device. In 2010, the Kindle reduced its price from $399 to $189, and some agencies calculated that the cost of equipment parts plus assembly costs had reached $185.49 at that time. The price is getting lower and lower, almost to the point of losing money, the Kindle is counting on the content store's long-term fishing for big fish.
Unfortunately, the Kindle ecosystem, which tries to use the reader as a traffic entrance, does not have much living space in China.
Palm reading, Oper Arms Boox and many other domestic readers have long realized composite functions, such as recording, AI reading, etc.; high-end products launched by Hanwang and iFLYTEK, etc., the functions are even approaching the smart tablet.
Image source: A brand reader e-commerce details page
But even for readers who pursue an immersive single reading, the Kindle's content advantages are limited.
There are a large number of kindle book resources in PDF format that are difficult to support smoothly in China, and various online reading platforms also have free books including massive online texts, such as WeChat reading with more than 200 million registered users and more than 5 million monthly active users.
In contrast, the price of genuine Kindle e-books is often more than a dozen or twenty yuan, in addition to the relatively cost-effective member monthly subscription service, there is no more weight that can retain users.
Teacher Yao, who has just received the second-hand Kindle that he just bought, said that the Kindle store could not meet his own needs, and he was most worried about after-sales when he first heard about exiting China, but when he thought about it carefully, kindle also had nothing to say after-sales, only a pity.
Simply put, reading doesn't save the Kindle.
Cui Lili, executive director and researcher of the E-commerce Research Institute of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, analyzed that relying on content to earn commercial value is not suitable for the development of Kindle in China, but should operate according to platform thinking, that is, to innovate products and services according to reading habit data, but this depends on the continuous reading of consumers, compared with the large ecological user groups of online platforms such as WeChat Reading, Kindle cannot form a closed loop.
"We've been researching the digital reading market in China, but the Kindle has never been our main focus." Zhang Yi, chief analyst of Ai Media Consulting, said bluntly.
I love you, goodbye
A single e-reader, represented by the Kindle, is ushering in the twilight of the Chinese market.
Ai Media Consulting data shows that the market size of China's digital reading industry is continuing to rise, and it is expected to reach 45.39 billion yuan in 2022. As of June 2020, the number of users in China's digital reading industry reached 510 million.
The reading market is good, but e-readers are far from mainstream.
According to the 18th National Reading Survey of the China Press and Publication Research Institute, 76.7% of adult citizens have read on mobile phones in 2020, and 27.2% have read on e-readers.
The mobile phone is what Zhang Yi said is the centralized, miniature intelligent mobile terminal, under the trend of fragmented reading, the mobile phone reading terminal grafted on social and traffic is also in full swing.
Source: Ai Media Consulting | 2020 China Digital Reading Industry Innovation Trend Special Research Report》
But the strange thing is that although the reader is in the sunset, the mobile phone side of the performance of the palm reading, get, Jingdong reading, etc. have launched or cooperated to launch hardware products, in 2021 WeChat Reading also cooperated with Wenshi to launch an ink screen reader priced at 1499 yuan. What is this operation?
In this regard, in addition to the low technical threshold, Zhang Yi analysis believes that under the general direction of promoting the integration of the real economy and technology, hardware with software is a more ideal development path, which helps to make the story of digital reading more complete, but this platform-dependent business model is fundamentally different from Kindle.
Therefore, the biggest impact of Kindle's exit is only to make domestic manufacturers who do the same single business lose the ideal type of benchmarking.
In the rolling tide of digital reading in China, there has long been no Kindle position. It was an inevitable goodbye, it was only a matter of time before it happened.
"Life goes on, and the prom never stops."
END