In September 2012, Amazon founder Bezos introduced Amazon's new Product, Kindle Paperwhite, in the United States. (Visual China/Photo)
On January 3, 2022, a user posted a screenshot of the official direct store of Jingdong Kindle on Weibo, asking the reason for the Kindle's large-scale shortage of goods, which caused public concern. The next day, the Beijing News reported that the Kindle may withdraw from the Chinese market, and Amazon China has previously laid off the Kindle hardware team.
On January 4, Amazon China publicly responded that it will be committed to serving Chinese consumers, and can also purchase hardware devices from third-party online and offline retail stores. Kindle e-book library also responded through Weibo: At present, only the manufacturer is out of stock, there will be an improvement after March 2022, and the Kindle bookstore will not be closed.
On January 7, Southern Weekend reporters asked Amazon China about Kindle's withdrawal from the Chinese market and other related issues, and the other party said that there was no more content to share for the time being.
"When I heard the news, my first reaction was that I didn't expect the Kindle to last so long." Hu Xiaodong was previously the vice president of Duoguan Technology, an e-reading and video development service provider that started out as a Chinese system designed for Kindle users.
In June 2013, the Kindle e-reader officially entered the Chinese market, and Hu Xiaodong judged that the Kindle's "Chinese Dream" was difficult to achieve. In fact, according to the Amazon Chronicle, even within Amazon, the Kindle did not think that the Product had much prospects at first. However, this is still symbolic for China to open the era of e-books.
At present, the domestic e-reader market has long been surging, multi-look, Wenshi, palm reading, millet, iFLYTEK have entered the game, during which there is no lack of Internet platforms, WeChat reading is growing day by day. Compared with the frequency of annual updates of domestic readers, the Kindle, which has been in China for nine years, has not seen new products in the past three years.
From coming with glory to quietly falling behind, where did the Kindle lose in the Chinese market?
Out of stock everywhere
"This one has been out of stock for two years." On January 8, 2022, in front of the Kindle retail counter on the second floor of the Guangzhou Book Purchase Center, the shopping guide pointed to an Amazon Premium Version Kindle and told the Southern Weekend reporter. The shopping guide was wearing iFLYTEK's blue vest.
The Kindle counter is only the size of a single desk, which displays three products from Amazon, and the lowest priced youth version reader is currently available, priced at 599 yuan, the classic version of the reader is still stuck in the 4th generation of Paperwhite, and the premium version is only a prototype.
"Can I book the Premium Edition?" The shopping guide shook his head, saying that he did not know whether this product would be produced, and he really wanted to buy the prototype at a 30% discount. If you can't accept it, you can only choose the classic version, but this stock is not much.
In order to determine the shortage of offline retail stores, the Southern Weekend reporter went to the Kindle retail store located in the Guangzhou Friendship Store, and a shopping guide introduced that their company is the general agent in South China, "Even our company does not have it, it is really out of stock." He inquired and found that there were more than twenty prototypes left in the latest classic version, and there were several prototypes in the premium version.
Jiang Shan is also a shopping guide for an offline retail store at Kindle. He recalled that in 2019, the price of the newly released Kindle Oasis was set to be relatively expensive, but due to the high-end design, it sold very well, and hundreds of units were shipped a month for the Premium Edition. Not to mention, the classic version has always been the best seller in its kind of reader.
But he also feels that the Kindle's hardware updates have slowed down in recent years. For example, the latest Kindle Oasis series is the third generation and will be released in June 2019. Since then, the series has not been updated.
The Kindle Oasis series was first released in China in April 2016, and the first generation and the second generation were separated by one year and two months, but it took more than two years from the second generation to the third generation.
After the classic Version of the Paperwhite Collection was released in July 2019, the fifth generation of the series was not launched until September 2021, two years apart. This is more unusual, previously, since the Kindle entered China in 2013, it has basically maintained an annual update state, and it will be new in half a year at the shortest.
Jiang Shan also remembered that the original Kindle had a large experience store on the first floor of the Guangzhou Book Purchase Center, and it could also carry out maintenance services. Around 2018, this experience store was withdrawn. Now, the customer has after-sales needs, he can only suggest calling the official customer service.
In October 2021, Amazon closed the official Kindle Tmall flagship store.
Southern Weekend reporter to Jingdong Kindle official self-operated store to consult the new time of the product, the other party responded, "Show that there is no stock is uncertain arrival time." Previously, the self-media geek park asked the customer service of the Jingdong self-operated store, and the reply was that the lack of stock was caused by the lack of chips by the manufacturer, but it was temporarily out of stock, and the follow-up would continue to arrive at F goods.
In addition to the official Kindle store, there are also a number of online stores selling Kindles online. After communicating with the merchants, it was found that these online stores either sold the American or Japanese Version of the Kindle, or resold the second-hand Kindle or counter prototypes.
Since the introduction of e-book readers into China in 2013, Kindle has been operating in China for nine years. (Visual China/Photo)
"Unsatisfied"
Before 2013, when the Kindle had not officially entered the Chinese mainland, it was already sought after by some users, and the way they owned this reader was parallel goods and daigou.
Since the original product is not aimed at Chinese users, and there is no Chinese resources to read, companies such as Duoguan Technology provide Chinese users with a Chinese system for the Kindle.
Hu Xiaodong believed at that time that after the Kindle entered China, it would win the attention of niche high-end users with Amazon's signboard and gain user volume, but due to the difficulties of Chinese e-book conversion, user habits, technology market adaptation and other issues, it is worth observing whether the future can continue to sell hot.
He analyzed that "the success of the Kindle in the United States is difficult to replicate in China." This has to do with differences in the mechanism of book distribution.
The book distribution mechanism in the United States is to first put on hardcover books, such as $25; a year later, paperback books are issued at a price of $10, and what Amazon does is to issue e-books at the same time as hardcover books, and the price is the same as paperbacks. It can be said that Amazon e-books are the electronicization of American paperback books.
Amazon e-books seized the window period for hardcover and paperback books in the United States to hit the shelves, successfully attracting users to pay. In the book "Amazon Chronicle", it is written that Amazon's official website has said that the release and hot sales of the Kindle have not affected the business of paper books, but have rekindled people's love of reading, and the purchase of paper books has not decreased but has risen.
However, China's book distribution does not have the same window period as in the United States, and piracy is rampant, making it even more difficult to pay for content.
In 2011, Liu Qiangdong, chairman of JD.com's board of directors, bluntly mentioned in an interview that kindle will never succeed in China. Even if you go back ten years, let Bezos take $2 billion to Start a Business in China, you can't burn a Kindle. Because Chinese consumers will crack the Kindle first, all formats can be used, and they will never buy content with you again.
Inspired by the Kindle, many domestic companies have also begun to enter the field of digital reading. There are digital reading platforms such as Palm Reading, Dangdang, JD.com, weChat Reading, etc., and manufacturers such as iFLYTEK and Wenshi have launched e-readers by using their own technical advantages.
Among the players who enter the game reader, some of them, like Kindle, rely on internal book city resources to obtain electronic copyrights, and some are "local tycoon players" who purely use reading as a traffic entrance, and some provide value-added services for core customer groups and improve product ecology. For these companies, reading is not expected to be too profitable, but instead requires companies to subsidize operations.
Especially after the rise of online free reading platforms such as Tomato and Seven Cats, the rules of China's digital reading game have been rewritten. Zhou Yun, who has been engaged in online literature editing for many years, feels this deeply, "Under the logic of the Chinese Internet, 'free' play 'pay' must be 'free' to win." ”
In the case of free content, digital reading platforms have found a business model for advertising + IP conversion. While Kindle's content is still biased towards the digitization of traditional publications, copyright restrictions and user size have prevented it from adopting an advertising plus free business model.
At the same time, some digital reading platforms also share the benefits with authors and cultivate their own author groups by clicking on the number of views and advertising commissions, which provides sufficient content for their free reading.
The highlight moment that belongs to the Kindle is 2018. As a company that rarely publishes sales data, Amazon rarely released Kindle data in China in June of that year: e-readers sold millions of units, paid e-book downloads increased 10 times from when they entered China in 2013, the number of Kindle paying users increased 12 times compared with 2013, and the number of publishing houses cooperating with Amazon China reached more than 700. The total number of registered users in China is second only to the United States and the United Kingdom.
But the good times did not last long, and no sales data was released since then. In April 2019, Reuters and other foreign media reported that Amazon's e-commerce business withdrew from China, and only overseas purchases, Kindle, cloud computing and other businesses continued. Today, more than two years later, there are voices of the Kindle withdrawing from China.
In January 2022, at the Kindle third-party offline retail outlet in a shopping mall in Guangzhou, only a few prototypes were left in the Premium Edition, and only more than 20 prototypes were left in the Paperwhite series. (Southern Weekend reporter Zhou Xiaoling/photo)
The lifeblood of copyright is in the hands of others
E-bookstores are key to Paying for Kindle user content. As a foreign company, the first content problem that Amazon faces when entering China is the license of electronic publications.
The way it chose was to work with a licensed company in China. At that time, China's leading digital copyright content operator "Chinese Online" provided operational support for it.
In 2016, Kindle launched the Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service for monthly members, which allows members to read tens of thousands of e-books at a monthly subscription fee of 12 yuan / month and 118 yuan / month for annual members.
Zheng Huanzhao, an associate professor at the School of Liberal Arts at Jinan University, is a deep reader user. In his research work, Zheng Huanzhao often needs to use original books in foreign languages, and the advantage of buying Kindle members at first was valued.
It stands to reason that Zheng Huanzhao is the target user of the Kindle. However, in mid-2020, he canceled his consecutively paid Kindle monthly subscription membership due to the feeling that it was not worth the money, especially the reduction in the number of original foreign books.
"It's actually not very open since the beginning of 2019." Including the Kindle, Zheng Huanzhao has three different manufacturers of readers, and uses iFLYTEK's business books more in his work.
Online reading has also long since shifted to local reading platforms. Due to the needs of research, Zheng Huanzhao now mainly uses the starting point Chinese to understand the latest online literary works, reading more can accommodate reading materials in different file formats, and academic e-books are viewed through Jingdong Reading.
However, domestic reading platforms are also restricted in foreign language original books. Zheng Huanzhao said that the decrease in kindle's original foreign books is also due to the stricter restrictions on foreign publications in Chinese law, so that foreign platforms can only provide reading materials that have obtained book publishing licenses when operating in China. This also makes it impossible for Kindle to play to its own advantages and build a "moat" in the copyright content of imported original books.
In terms of content copyright in China, Kindle is also subject to traditional publishing houses.
In 2012, Sun ming worked for a major publishing group in China and worked on several projects with the Kindle. When the Kindle first entered China, there were also many reader hardware vendors in China, and the common problem encountered by everyone was that the number of copyrights was too small. "E-books in general accounted for less than 10% of the total number of books that year, especially when there were no hot and best-selling books."
The reason is that the early e-books were specially digitized by the departments of traditional publishing houses, and e-books relied on the author resources and topic resources of traditional publishing houses. Traditional paper publishing houses are reluctant to sell their books as electronic versions, fearing that they will rob authors and rob them of performance.
"If a publishing house's revenue of 100 million yards a year (total book pricing) comes from 90% of paper books, he will not support e-books." Sun Ming said.
He introduced that in the composition of the yard ocean, bookstores take nearly half of the income, Xinhua bookstores generally pay out at a 60% discount, private bookstores and online store channel discounts are even higher, leaving very little income for publishing houses. If the electronic copyright of the publishing house is to be divided with the platform, although the royalty of the e-book can be given to 30%, the price of the e-book is low, the user market size is not large enough, the profit of the publishing house is not high, and it may also affect the sales of paper books.
Zhang Wenyi, global vice president of Kindle, said in 2017 that Kindle e-books did not impact paper book sales but drove sales, such as "The Name of the People" paper books sold out of stock, after the TV series screening, e-book sales rose more than 170 times.
In Sun Ming's view, due to the small size of the Kindle e-book market, it is difficult to succeed in using the revenue sharing mechanism of traditional publishing houses to make e-books. If publishing houses abandon the paper book market and only make e-books, I am afraid that they will starve to death.
"E-books must not be made with traditional gameplay. For example, the people who do online literature will not be the people who make paper books. Sun Ming explained that the difference is in the aggregation of author resources, the tradition is to take the prepayment model, while the network relies on clicks and advertising to divide accounts.
However, due to the cost pressure of their own operations, the top management of domestic publishing houses are generally trying to find ways to digitally transform. Therefore, despite the divergence of interest distribution, Kindle can still establish cooperative relations with many domestic publishing houses.
However, new difficulties have emerged. The wave of mobility has changed the reading habits of users, digital reading is dominated by shallow reading, paper books are also becoming thinner, and there are fewer and fewer serious reading materials with 300,000 or 400,000 words, and the trend of fragmentation is inevitable. "Now people don't even have the patience to watch a show, and the short video will be told to you in five minutes."
Soon, Kindle also realized that it needed to add more content that could retain users' time — online novels.
In 2017, Amazon launched the Amazon Kindle X Migu e-book reader with Migu, a subsidiary of China Mobile, which brought more than 400,000 online literary works to the Kindle Bookstore, doubling the Kindle's book resources. In addition, tencent reading online novels can also be seen on the Kindle.
The main force of online reading is young people, according to Zhou Yun, the current traffic of major online reading platforms is also online literature. It can also be seen from the lists of the two major platforms of palm reading and WeChat reading that most of the popular books come from online literature.
An online publishing industry insider revealed to the Southern Weekend reporter that in the early days, Amazon had unlimited scenery, and cooperation with the publishing house was still the posture of Party A, and the sharing settlement mechanism was more stringent. However, online reading platforms like those supported by Internet companies are more generous in paying royalties and have large user scale, which has also become an important reason for publishing houses to actively cooperate with electronic copyright.
However, whether it is traditional published content or online published content, Kindle has not yet formed its own content ecology, and its fate is still in the hands of others.
(Liang Shuyi/Photo)
"The primary goal is to make the 'Kindle' disappear"
In terms of hardware, the update adjustment of the Kindle is nothing more than thin and light, eye protection, and China's local reader hardware manufacturers have also begun to show their magic in hardware functions.
Zhou Yun said that any reader today claims to be an "eye protector."
Southern Weekend reporters visited offline and found that in addition to the continuous investment in the "ink screen technology" advocated by Kindle, local hardware manufacturers also solved the single function of Kindle, black and white screen and other issues.
For example, after a reader company in Guangzhou is equipped with an Android system, the open source ecology of the reader can download many software available for learning and office, one of which uses color screen technology, which also improves the writing texture of the stylus. Another company added transcription transcription to the reader, positioning it as a business book serving mid- and high-end users.
In addition, China's online reading software platform can also provide more personalized services, such as many audio radio dramas, to meet the needs of users to listen to books while exercising, walking, and sitting in the car.
"Chinese consumers never seem to prefer devices that are too single-functioning." Zheng Huanzhao's personal experience is that the goal of e-readers is to make users immersed in reading, not full of temptation like the iPad, but also to meet a variety of office needs. What the public hopes is to be able to switch between various pages at any time, read novels, watch videos, and play games, which is why readers are easily replaced by mobile phones and tablets.
Not only that, but the Kindle is not as hard as Apple in the ecology around terminal devices. For example, Amazon acquired audible, an audiobook site, but does not support Amazon China account login. Zheng Huanzhao said that the Kindle's equipment and ecology did not make users sticky.
The situation seems to have developed very differently from Bezos's original idea of doing the Kindle.
Amazon Chronicles chronicles the scene in which, on November 19, 2007, in the lobby of the W Hotel in New York's Union Square, Bezos showed the original Kindle to the public.
He said, "Books have a very special nature, which is 'it will disappear.'" "When people hold a book and focus on the story in it, they forget about the book itself, the quality of the paper, and even the ink of the printed word, and that's what they're looking at for e-readers, and they want to make the reader 'disappear'.
Zhang Wenyi, vice president of Amazon China, joined Amazon in May 2013 and was responsible for the Kindle's business in China, which the media called The Kindle's "guide" into China. She once told the media, "The Kindle is not just a hardware device, it is also a platform for services." Content is its core and soul. ”
But the question is, when the hardware carrier "disappears", can the content of Kindle e-books continue to be selected by Chinese users in the dazzling reading market?
(At the request of the interviewees, Jiang Shan and Sun Ming are pseudonyms in the text.) ）
Southern Weekend reporter Zhou Xiaoling Southern Weekend intern Lin Qianbing