Text | Chopped pepper TMT, author | blue lotus
"If Kindle withdraws from China, no matter which platform takes over this part of the user and traffic, at least, the publishing company will lose the revenue of an important channel."
The news of the "Kindle's withdrawal from China" spread for a week, but the official announcement of the withdrawal from China was not officially released.
The head of the Kindle channel at a publishing company said, "At present, it should be just a business adjustment."
For listed companies whose main business is book publishing, although the e-book business is not large, it has become an independent revenue channel and has gradually grown.
CITIC Publishing's 2020 digital content revenue was 70.49 million;
The new classic counts the e-book and audiobook business together, with revenue of 24.08 million in 2020;
Guomai Culture's digital content business revenue in 2020 is 10.74 million;
Phoenix Media's Yilin Publishing House e-book business will earn 6 million yuan in 2020...
This design, which was commented by netizens as "deep insight into human nature", allows users to show the bibliography they want their friends to see. For a time, how to raise pigs, how to learn excavators and many other popular "stand-in bookshelf" hit the internet.
01 Kindle high-end atmosphere on the grade, but not practical
China's e-reading market has been developing for at least 12 years.
From the beginning of the Hanwang reader in 2010, to the entry of the Kindle into China, and then to the rise of domestic electronic reading apps and e-readers such as WeChat reading and palm reading, the overall industry pattern has also changed from a unique company to a separate competition, and now a relatively stable situation of two males and two males.
It seems that a small vertical market, but the competition is extremely fierce, the "front wave" is always "back wave" mercilessly patted on the beach.
Hanwang e-book reader was once the largest brand in China, with a market share of more than 70%. But as iPads and large-screen phones gradually hit the e-reader market, Hanwang began to decline.
At that time, although Hanwang was mainly focusing on "high-quality e-books", he invested too much energy in hardware to do research and development, and did not pay enough attention to copyright content, resulting in the book city to a certain extent "quantity without quality". Knowing that the poor attention paid to the Han King's electric paper book is also a confirmation.
The Kindle is different. Since entering China in 2013, relying on Amazon's high-quality resources, it has counterattacked all the way in the field of high-quality e-books.
Kindle has its own relatively complete ecology. From online web pages to iOS and Android, there are clients of their own. With Kindle's cloud service, users can view their own resources on multiple devices, and there are a wealth of plugins on various platforms such as Send to Kindle. Readers can send long materials to the Kindle and read them slowly.
In addition, users spontaneously formed a variety of Kindle resource stations, such as bitter melon book tray, perfect book library, iKindle, dog ears and so on. Among them, the bitter melon book tray is a website for netizens to exchange 6-inch pdf and mobi format e-book production technology suitable for electric paper books.
These greatly increase the convenience of using the Kindle, and the Hanwang Electric Paper Book does not have these advantages at all.
The head of the Kindle channel of the above-mentioned publishing company believes that because the Kindle is for global users, it has a very high status in the e-book cooperation channel of publishing houses and copyright companies, and the industry attaches great importance to it.
In 2018, Kindle released a data, into China 5 years, Kindle e-book reader in China cumulative sales of millions of units, China's e-bookstore total of nearly 700,000 books, an increase of nearly 10 times over 2013.
But even so, the Kindle's own problems remain unresolved. One of the core issues is experience. For example, the Kindle's page turning speed is slow, and the downloaded documents also need to be converted into formats that kindle can recognize; the response is not sensitive, and amazon accounts need to be bound.
This results in a higher idle rate for Kindle e-readers. The meme about the Kindle on the Internet is that the biggest scene is "cover bubble noodles".
In the view of a young reader, the biggest role of Kindle in China is to give gifts, send friends or send employees, which is a cultural gift, not like a personal consumer product, mainly impractical, no product improvement mechanism. "It just makes people feel that the high-end atmosphere is forced to be forced, and it is useless in the end."
The second unsolved problem is that the profits of the Kindle reader have been depressed and basically unprofitable. According to the research agency isupply analysis and evaluation, the Kindle does not include software, agency, design and other expenses, parts assembly costs have reached 185 US dollars, and it is not profitable to sell them for 189 US dollars.
This means that a large part of Kindle's revenue needs to rely on subscription purchases in e-book cities. Unfortunately, the domestic e-reading payment habit is still cultivated, and even prefer to read pirated books without copyright, or free books.
Readers who have used kindle should know that as long as they buy a dozen to 30 yuan of pirated services a year, they can easily obtain a lot of pirated books and electronic resources at home and abroad through book search, and push them directly to the Kindle.
02 WeChat Reading: The copyright holder wins the world
In the third year of Kindle's entry into China, another domestic electronic reading app, WeChat Reading, was born. WeChat reading positioning is the main electronic publication APP.
However, in the first few years, WeChat Reading has been tepid, and even the industry is not clear about the ownership of this product in the Tencent system, whether it belongs to the Reading Group or to WeChat? Someone answered on the investor relations platform of Reading Group that Reading And WeChat are jointly owned by both parties, and the income is three or seven points.
Starting from 2020, especially after the epidemic, the demand for online reading has soared, and WeChat reading has begun to exert efforts to increase the supply of free e-book copyrights in the mall. Even, in 2020, the fuse of the author storm of the Reading Group was also because WeChat Reading carried out a limited-time free operation activity.
In the end, the Kindle lost to the "free real incense" law. After two years, many former Kindle users have become WeChat readers.
Xiaoxia, a young man of literature and art, said that in the past, he would often buy e-books from the Kindle, and now the WeChat books APP can be read for free, basically meeting the needs of reading books, and it is also very convenient to watch large-screen mobile phones or IPADs, without having to bring an additional device.
"They also have cheap annual passes, 128 a year. If you don't buy an annual pass, there will be a lot of mini-game points in WeChat Reading to redeem e-books in the book city, and you can also read them for free. ”
Of course, in addition to e-books, the online novels of the Reading Group also open the door to WeChat reading. You know, reading group has the largest library of online novels in China. In this way, in terms of copyright, WeChat reading occupies an absolute advantage.
At the end of 2019, Reading Group announced that the cumulative registered users of WeChat Reading have reached 210 million, of which the daily active volume of pure publishing users has exceeded 2 million.
Previously, WeChat Reading also tried to make a reader, priced at 1499 yuan, and came with a free reading paid annual card, January 27, 2021, began pre-sale. This reader takes Aragoniston BOOX Poke3 as the hardware basis, replaced by WeChat Reading's own WeRead system, the appearance and system are more concise, but it no longer supports third-party APP installation, and the first batch is limited to 500 units. Since then, there has been no news of expanding production.
A copyright industry insider said that WeChat reading is very clear, that is, to take the free copyright, you can quickly accumulate users, copyright is the first, hardware is the second.
03 iReader and those disappearing e-book apps
At present, in addition to WeChat reading, the e-book APP with a relatively large copyright library is iReader under palm reading. This is related to the copyright reserve of the e-book of Palm Reading itself. Reading and palm reading are themselves the top two companies in domestic e-book copyright.
More importantly, compared with WeChat Reading's caution in e-readers, Palm Reading has invested more in e-readers.
"Compared to the Kindle, the palm reader is more responsive and has a larger screen. I'm an advanced version, 2500 bucks. Now many screenwriters in the film and television industry are using the palm reading of this large-screen e-reader, as well as a modification pen, you can write and draw. ”
In addition to this large-screen reader and the electronic reading APP, palm reading has also begun to develop in the direction of business office. The reader is just one function, and meetings and recordings, including audio to text, are all integrated. "In contrast, it is rare to see an improvement in the Kindle's product."
In fact, after Kindle entered China and opened the market, many domestic online reading apps quickly followed up and further reduced Kindle's user base in the Chinese market.
But in the end, only WeChat Reading and Palm Reading can compete with Kindle in terms of content copyright and hardware, while other e-reading apps and readers are tepid or gradually withdraw from the market.
"I've used Migu's reader before, not actively downloading, mainly the book I want to read, only Migu has the copyright." After reading it, I never opened Migu reading again and lay in my phone. For a while, I also used NetEase Snail, and I never used it again in 2019. ”
Copyright, or free copyright, is the most central dominant variable in this competition. This is similar to free and paid copyright for musical works in the music field.
For example, there is an e-reading APP called "z-library", some people call it a public welfare e-reading website, to put it bluntly, it is a free e-book aggregation website, the resources are very complete, including novels, non-novels, scientific literature and various publications, etc., and can be downloaded and read online through fb2, pdf, lit, epub and other formats.
The above friend said that in the past, it was often bought from Confucius's old books online, but there are many out-of-print e-books on the z-library, which are also free. "I'm now an IReader member, and A z-library is for all your reading needs."
In fact, the size of the e-reading market is not large. According to the "2020 China Digital Reading Report" released by the 7th China Digital Reading Conference, in 2020, 1.4 billion Chinese the overall digital reading industry scale is 35.16 billion yuan, which is not as good as the annual revenue of a BAT company 's cloud computing (40 billion).