The "bubble noodle artifact" has passed! Recently, rumors on social networks about Kindle's withdrawal from the Chinese market have gone viral.
Sharp-eyed netizens found that on Amazon's official website in China, the full line of Kindle products has been displayed as out of stock for a period of time. In addition, Kindle's Tmall flagship store has been closed, and the rest of Kindle's products are basically out of stock in the Jingdong Mall. Some media quoted sources as saying that Amazon had previously laid off the Kindle's hardware team in China, and it was basically a nail in the coffin to withdraw from the domestic market.
Related topics have aroused heated discussion among netizens, after all, Kindle was also a popular campus Internet celebrity product in previous years, and it is a must for young people in literature and art. A few years have passed, and it has fallen into such a situation, many literary and artistic young people can't help but feel that time is rushing, and the collection of e-books has not yet had time to read. Some netizens joked that the Kindle in their hands was going to become a "full-time instant noodle cover".
Seeing that the rumors became more and more true, Amazon officials could not sit still.
Amazon officials denied kindle withdrawal from the Chinese market, responding: "The high-quality customer service and warranty services provided by Amazon will not change." The Kindle e-book reader is popular with consumers, and some models are currently sold out in the Chinese market. ”
Amazon will not abandon the Chinese market
At least officially, The Kindle hasn't given up on the Chinese market yet. According to past performance, Kindle is not willing to give up the Chinese market.
In 2007, when the iPhone came out, Amazon, which started as an online bookstore, launched its own electronic product, the Kindle reader.
Unlike China, paper books in developed areas of Europe and the United States are not only very compact in layout, but also not beautifully bound, and the price is generally high. For many people, especially those who are not well off, buying a paper book is a huge expense.
As a pioneer, Kindle directly benchmarked paper books, and Bezos' goal was to make "all people who sell paper books unemployed", to give any user access to any book in any language within 60 seconds.
However, at this time, the Kindle not only has a keyboard, the appearance design is also very bulky, looking a bit like an electronic calculator with a larger screen. However, the E-Ink 6.0-inch electronic paper screen it uses brings a more comfortable reading experience, even if you look at the electronic screen for a long time, there will be no strong visual fatigue, and the price of e-books is much lower than that of paper books, which has successfully attracted the attention of users in the US market and gradually gained a foothold in the market.
In 2010, Amazon's e-book sales surpassed physical books for the first time.
Jobs showed disdain for the Kindle, believing it to be a product with no future, after all, "fewer and fewer people will read books." If the function of electronic products is too single, there is no potential space for development. Of course, Jobs did do it more comprehensively. In 2010, the iPad, apple tablet with only five buttons in its entire body, came out, prompting Amazon to upgrade the Kindle.
In 2011, the fourth generation of the Kindle eliminated the keyboard. The touch-enabled Kindle Touch, launched at the same time, put the Kindle on the path of touch operation.
While there is an overwhelming advantage in the e-book vertical, the Kindle's sales are a far cry from tablets.
What the Kindle can do, the tablet can do; the tablet can do, the Kindle basically can't do it. For most users, the reading comfort of the ink screen is not worth an additional few hundred dollars.
In this case, the only people who are willing to buy Kindles are literary and artistic youths who think that they have a huge demand for reading, and the total number of literary and artistic youth is only so much.
According to IHSiSuppli, a market research firm, global e-book reader shipments were 23.2 million units in 2011 and fell to 7.8 million units in 2015.
The most useless "necessities"?
In 2013, Kindle entered the Chinese market.
Along with social networks and offline word-of-mouth publicity, Kindle has made a huge breakthrough in urban white-collar circles and college campuses. In the afternoon café, drinking coffee while reading with a Kindle has become the daily routine of literary and artistic youth.
Amazon China's public data shows that in 2016, China has become Amazon's world's largest Kindle device sales market. In the Kindle Unlimited e-book package monthly service, China is also the third largest market after the United States and the United Kingdom. As of 2018, the Kindle's cumulative sales in China were in the millions.
In the case of bottlenecks in overseas markets, Zhang Wenyi, Amazon's global vice president, said: "The interest of Chinese readers is crucial to our business development. ”
Amazon has indeed shown sincerity, and Kindle's innovation in localization of the Chinese market is remarkable.
Kindle not only launched the white version in the Chinese market, but also launched two Chinese user-customized colors of smoke purple and jade green; joined hands with the Forbidden City and Dunhuang Research Institute to launch the "Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" and the customized shell of Dunhuang mural elements; and joined hands with Migu Reading to launch the "Online Text Reader", and continued to work with domestic writers to promote reading... In addition, there is a "Please tell the publisher that I want to see the Kindle version of this book" button on the Amazon paper book page. According to insiders, this is an important indicator for Kindle to find a publishing house in China to talk about copyright, and use reader demand to "coerce" publishers to promote more e-books online.
In the eyes of industry insiders, in the process of china's paper book digitization, Kindle is not only an industry evangelist, a technology provider, but even plays the role of a standard setter.
But in the past, the domestic literary and artistic youth also found a problem: when buying the Kindle, they wanted to read books, but after taking it back, they basically did not use it.
The fast-paced urban life has greatly squeezed the reading time of contemporary young people, and "fast reading" and "broken reading" have become the mainstream of young people. Even with a Kindle in hand, the preferred device for most people to read online is still a mobile phone. For the student body, laptops and tablets are also better suited to the needs of everyday learning.
In addition, the Kindle's data line is not the currently commonly used Type-C interface, want to use more than one data line, afraid of trouble young people are naturally more unhappy.
At the end of 2021, Idle Fish selected "Top Ten Useless Commodities of the Year", and the e-reader ranked third with the evaluation of "a relatively expensive instant noodle peripheral".
At a time when e-books are on the rise, many people have worried about the fate of paper books. However, paper books show great vitality. Since 2014, domestic paper book sales have picked up.
Compared with the high price of foreign paper books, domestic paper books are not expensive. The price of e-books on the Kindle is constantly rising, on par with paper books. Since the price is similar, for the group that really has reading requirements, a heavy paper book brings a sense of reading ritual and experience far better than the electronic screen.
Some reading enthusiasts believe that "e-books lack both the feelings of paper books and the fashion of mobile devices, which seems a bit embarrassing and inappropriate." ”
In addition, as an important occasion for offline social networking, bookstores and libraries carry far more than selling books and reading books, under the tide of new consumption, net red physical bookstores are becoming "cultural landmarks", highlighting a strong vitality.
Although e-book equipment is spinning in place, the domestic digital reading market is still booming. According to the "China Digital Reading Report", the scale of Digital Reading users in China in 2020 was 494 million, an increase of 5.56% year-on-year; the overall size of the digital reading industry market was 35.16 billion, with a growth rate of 21.8%.
Is e-paper the big deal?
The absolute advantage in the vertical field makes Amazon have no strong willingness to transform and upgrade the Kindle, resulting in the current embarrassing situation. However, manufacturers who are good at finding business opportunities have a greater interest in ink screens and the electronic paper behind them because of the popularity of the Kindle.
At the end of the 20th century, E-Ink company used electrophoresis technology to invent electronic ink, ink screen relies on reflected rather than emitted light, its surface attached to the "microcapsules" encapsulated with negative black particles and positive white particles, by changing the charge so that different colors of particles are arranged in order, thus presenting a black and white visualization, power consumption is 50 to 100 times lower than the liquid crystal display.
Electronic paper is a display in which electronic ink is coated on a layer of plastic film, pasted on a thin film transistor circuit, and controlled by a drive IC to form a pixel pattern. The use of flexible substrate materials makes the electronic paper not only as thin as paper, but also can be wound and folded at will, which is expected to greatly reduce the consumption and damage rate of the end product. In some large chain supermarkets, electronic paper shelf labels have replaced traditional paper price tags.
China is the world's largest electronic paper (EPD) manufacturing and export region. According to statistics, of the more than 3,000 e-paper-related invention patents since 2015, the number of patents from China accounts for 80%.
In 2021, E Ink Yuantai Technology, a leading supplier of electronic paper display technology, mass-produced the latest generation of printed color electronic paper New Kaleido. Yuantai Technology also jointly initiated the establishment of an electronic paper industry alliance with BOE and Xingtai Technology.
In terms of policy, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed to focus on strengthening the forward-looking industrial layout such as Micro-LED, electronic paper, silicon-based OLED, and printed display in 2022.
For office white-collar workers who stare at computer screens for a long time, the characteristics of electronic paper without hurting their eyes poke at their pain points, and also respond to the call for paperless office and smart office. In addition, the shortcomings of the ink screen full frame rate, low color saturation, and insufficient entertainment are more suitable for the needs of office scenes.
Many enterprises cut into ink screen products from a business point of view. In 2020, iFLYTEK released a smart office book with an ink screen that is convenient for handwriting records as the main selling point; in early 2021, Lenovo launched a dual-screen notebook with a 12-inch ink screen on one side; in November 2021, Huawei held an e-reader offline experience activity, and anecdotal rumors said that it would soon launch the MatePad Paper, an ink screen tablet equipped with the Hongmeng Harmony OS 2 system.
On January 6, BMW cooperated with Yuantai Technology to launch the BMW iXFlow, a "color-changing car" plastered with electronic paper all over the body, which attracted widespread attention from the US media. While changing the color of the body, electronic paper can also reduce the energy required by the electrical system and effectively increase the electric mileage.
The large-scale mass production of electronic paper large-screen touch and color screens still needs time, but it is foreseeable that the future application scenarios of electronic paper will be wider, and a new industrial outlet may be born.