Image source @ Visual China
Text | Advertising Meta universe, author 丨 guzi, editor 丨 daguang
If someone had put it on Jobs's desk, he would have been fired on the spot. —Walt Mossberg, technology columnist and digital collector
On December 23 last year, Idle Fish announced the list of "Top Ten Useless Commodities of the Year", summarizing the top ten second-hand commodities that have appeared on Idle Fish in the past year.
The third place is "e-reader".
As if in response to this list, two weeks later, netizens suddenly found that the official store of Jingdong Kindle had a large area of stock, and the official store of Taobao had already closed in October last year. #Kindle Exit China The topic instantly rushed to the hot search.
Although Amazon China later debunked rumors that "there is no plan to withdraw from China", it is an indisputable fact that Kindle has indeed long since changed from a "wenqing darling" to an embarrassing "bubble face cover" - even the official acknowledges it.
Six years ago, China was its largest market.
Once upon a time, Kindle was born on the mission of "dry flipping paper books" and sought to become an industry disruptor. Now, the paper book is still in the ascendant, but it is about to go.
01
Kindle is older than most popular digital brands.
In 2004, with the success of the iPod Walkman and its companion service iTunes, Apple became a hit in the field of software and hardware.
Bezos looked a little sour in his eyes, and he thought of his old business: "selling books."
In 1995, based on the judgment that book sales are the future of e-commerce, Bezos founded Amazon Online Bookstore.
This judgment is quite accurate. Amazon achieved a monthly turnover of $20,000 in two months of opening, survived the 2000 Internet bubble, achieved profitability in 2001, and became the first book e-commerce company in the United States a few years later.
Since Apple can rely on a Walkman to open up commercial channels for music producers and fans, why can't I amazon?
Bezos sees "e-readers" as the company's new growth point.
E-readers weren't invented by Amazon, and in the 15 years before that, NuvoMedia, Casio, and even Apple itself were more or less involved in the field of "handheld text reading."
But their products are either screen-blind or expensive — and most importantly, readers often can't find a book resource that can be adapted to a device. To put a book into a reader, you have to go through a variety of complex technical steps, like the user-tovert movie file format in the early days of MP4.
▲NuvoMedia's "Rocket Book", source: The Digital Reader
Bezos believes that if Amazon wants to make an e-reader, it must overcome these points:
A large enough library; enough convenient purchase service; anytime, anywhere reading experience; not inferior to the display effect of paper books.
Based on these keywords, the "Lab126" e-book research and development team was established. Leading the team was Steve Steve Kessel, then head of Amazon's book business.
It is said that Bezos called Kessel to his office and said to him, "Your mission is to destroy your business" and "to make all the people who sell paper books unemployed."
That's what Bezos expected of the Kindle: that one day, when everyone had an e-book reader, the traditional book publishing industry would die out like a CD and video store.
The team spent three and a half years researching—longer than a single tea pot," but much higher. In 2007, a generation of Kindles went on the market and fulfilled almost everything Bezos expected:
Instead of using LCD LCD screens like the previous "e-books", the so-called "E-ink" e-ink screen is used, and the reading experience is almost the same as that of paper books;
Directly built-in wireless network module, no need to connect to a computer or WiFi, download books anytime, anywhere - officially called "60 seconds to get a new book";
The purchase is quite convenient, after logging in to the Amazon account, see what book directly click buy;
Most importantly, there's a library of up to 90,000 books released along with the Kindle. This is Amazon's supreme magic weapon to crush other reader peers.
Of the top 112 new York Times bestseller lists, 100 instincts are seen on the Kindle. With wireless networks, users can also easily receive electronic versions of newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Time Magazine and so on.
Finally, there's the price: an e-book costs up to $9.99, and a non-popular book costs as little as five or six knives.
On November 19, 2007, Bezos released the Kindle in Manhattan, New York, and the first batch sold out at $399 and sold out within 5.5 hours. Some consumers' delivery cycles were delayed until 4 weeks later, and the company even issued a letter of apology.
The Kindle wasn't the first e-book product, but it was the first "successful" e-book.
02
Not everyone is optimistic about the Kindle, and the most famous Kindle black is Jobs.
Even established K fans admit that a generation of industrial design can be described as "disaster":
Huge page turning keys that can be touched by mistake at every turn, full keyboard with a very strange angle, a very difficult scrolling cylinder button, and a page number indicator that looks like an "old-fashioned mercury thermometer"...
You can imagine how Jobs would evaluate this product - don't forget that Joe helped the owner just released a generation of iPhones in the same year, the main selling points are "minimalist", "touch screen" and "keyboardless design".
"If someone had put this on Jobs's desk, he would have been fired on the spot," said Walt Mossberg, a tech columnist, half-jokingly.
But what disapproved Jobs the most was the business philosophy of Kindle and Amazon.
"40 percent of Americans haven't finished a book in the past year," Jobs said in an interview in 2008. People don't read anymore.
Bezos did not respond to the remarks, and the market gave the answer.
In 2008, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney analyzed in a report that the Kindle would sell 190,000 units in its first year of listing, and then raise that figure to 380,000. And that number ended up being 500,000.
As strong as Joe's helper, he also had to usher in his own "true fragrance" moment.
In March 2009, the Kindle app launched on the App Store, allowing iPhone users to read their purchased books on their phones.
In January 2010, Apple released its first iPad tablet, along with the "iBook" book function, which also supports online purchase of e-books.
In response to a reporter's question about "how to compete with the Kindle", Jobs said that "book publishers don't really like Amazon".
The implication is that kindle gives you how much publisher, and I give you double Apple.
well……
Once again, the market gave the answer: It wasn't until November 2010 that iBook increased its library to 60,000 —just matching the kindle's library when it was first launched. For comparison, Kindle already has a library of 750,000 books.
There is no doubt that the library is the soul of e-books, and in this regard, Amazon is like building a moat.
In the years that followed, Amazon updated its product line at a rate of one or even two per year:
The Kindle DX series with large screens; the Kindle voyage series with mid-to-high-end positioning; the Kindle Paperwhite series with low prices;
▲Source: techcrunch.com
Although not every one of them was successful (the DX line was cut), overall, the Kindle was always on the way uphill. By 2011, Amazon had eaten 73.7 percent of the global e-book market, and in 2010 alone, the Kindle business had $1.4 billion in revenue.
Bezos began to set his sights on a market that had not yet been reclaimed.
03
In June 2013, the Kindle officially entered China. At this time, it has been a full six years since the first generation began.
At 12:00 noon on the 7th, @Kindle China Sina official blog was established, and the first Weibo "Kindle is coming" received 8,000 retweets, 2,000 comments, and fans directly exceeded 1.5w in just five hours.
But not everyone is optimistic. Zuo Zhijian, CEO of Thumb Reading, wrote that "Kindle will not have a substantial impact on the digital reading industry."
In his view, Amazon, as a foreign investor, cannot play the "book sea advantage" of North America in the Chinese market, and content resources will become a short board; and with the popularity of small tablets such as iPad mini, users will be more inclined to choose multi-function digital devices rather than single readers.
Amazon is obviously not unaware of this, and they have adopted a dual development strategy: on the one hand, to increase the number of its library resources; on the other hand, to try to make the Kindle into a cultural symbol, targeting white-collar workers and college students in first-tier cities.
Those were the years when smartphones and the mobile Internet soared. "Low-headed people", "fragmented time" and "staying up late to brush mobile phones" have slowly become hot topics. The young man whose energy and attention have been kidnapped by the short and fast Internet desperately needs a symbol to "prove" that he is still the teenager he once was.
Kindle: Thanks, here I am.
In August 2015, Kindle and lifestyle magazine Ideal home launched the "Reading is Charming" series. In Beijing, 6 large shopping malls in Shanghai, participants can hold up the Kindle, and a professional photographer will take a photo, which will appear on the Start-up screen of the Kindle and the subway advertisements released in Beijing and Shanghai after screening;
In 2016, Zhihu, who almost never advertised (at least at that time), suddenly appeared on the right side of the homepage with the promotion of Kindle, which once triggered a wave of discussion inside and outside the station;
Every year on World Book Day, Kindle will launch a promotional video or a cooperation event with The Big V. Kindle's outdoor advertising at the airport and subway is also full of "literary and artistic fans".
Some people joke that the Kindle is a "redemption ticket for the digital age" for young people, as if buying a Kindle has crossed the threshold of "reading people" with half a foot.
This strategy really worked.
Since its entry into the Chinese market, Kindle has maintained double-digit growth rates almost every year. In 2016, China became the kindle's largest market in the world. By 2018, Amazon had sold millions of Kindles in China, with 700,000 online bookstores in stock, and paid users up 10-fold from five years ago.
In 2018, Amazon released the "China National Reading Report": 55% of respondents have read both paper books and e-books in the past year; the proportion of people who only read e-books accounts for 19% - far more than the 4% in 2017; and the post-90s and post-00s have the strongest desire to buy e-books, accounting for 82% and 85% of the e-book purchase population, respectively.
During this period, the Kindle, like cafes and MacBooks, became a symbol of "middle-class culture".
▲ KFC X Kindle co-theme café
Probably everyone did not expect that this painstakingly created symbol would disappear in the next three years.
04
I know that the last widely circulated passage perfectly summarizes the mental journey of many "impulsive" Kindle buyers:
People can place orders for certain symbols and identities, but long-term use requires real demand.
The need created by Kindle is very niche in itself.
According to the "Reading Industry Development Report" released in 2017, the overall size of the digital reading market is about 11 billion yuan, of which e-books account for only 2 billion yuan, and the remaining 9 billion is the world of online texts.
In other words, the digital reading market does exist, but the big part is not a serious user like Kindle who "reads a paper book on the screen", but thousands of online readers who are chasing updates.
In 2017, Kindle cooperated with China Mobile to launch a co-branded reader, in addition to the built-in Kindle mall, there is also Mobile's "Migu Reading", which provides users with "more than 400,000 online book libraries".
But this time the strategy began to fail.
On the one hand, subject to the natural defects of the ink screen, it is difficult for readers to smoothly complete the basic operations of online texts such as searching and downloading on the Kindle; the natural defects of the slow response of the ink screen also make readers who are accustomed to fast-paced reading of online texts very impatient.
On the other hand, companies that really hold heavyweight online text resource libraries are not willing to cooperate with Amazon.
Along the amazon to open up the market, palm reading, dangdang, more look, JD.com, iFLYTEK, Wenshi and a large number of other companies have launched their own e-readers. They either lean back in their own libraries; have larger (or smaller) screens; support handwriting annotations; or are less expensive than kindles.
This further encroaches on the already small e-reading market.
Even when reading paper books, the Kindle doesn't have a clear advantage.
Paper books are not as simple as "ink printing". Although the fourth-generation resolution (PPI) of kindle Paperwhite has reached the "laser printing" level, which is said to be "clearer than paper books", a considerable number of users still say that reading e-books is not as good as reading paper books to "remember". A book was brushed on the Kindle, "as if I hadn't read anything."
Studies have shown that many elements such as page turning, holding, and printing smell of paper books have assisted readers' memory to a certain extent; the memory model formed by classroom education for more than ten years is also easier for people to associate paper books with "knowledge".
These are far from what a high-definition "E-ink" screen can provide.
As of the completion of this article, the official Kindle JD store still shows "out of stock", and only the youth version is still on sale. Whether Amazon will actually take down the Kindle's China business remains unknown.
According to the "Tianyancha" information, kindle's parent company in China, "Beijing Century Excellence Information Technology Co., Ltd. Shenzhen Branch", is still in good business, and the only 3 risks are litigation lawsuits in 2019. There is no sign of the intention of withdrawing from China.
The era that belonged to the Kindle has indeed drifted away.
Bezos's rhetoric of "eliminating the physical book" eventually degenerated into a joke. In 2020, the American Publishers Association counted that 80% of the income of the traditional publishing industry in the United States came from paper books. E-books accounted for only 8.5%.
However, in any case, this is a digital product worth remembering.
In an era where all vendors are pursuing higher configurations and higher parameters, in an era where all developers are trying to fragment your attention and scramble to give you low-value stimuli, kindle really looks like a maverick Don Quixote.
It wants you to "put down your phone and go back to reading," and it also tries to get you back to your former self in the bookstore at the school gate, in the school library, immersed in the flow of heart.
Even if you don't succeed in the end, remember the spark it lit—as its name suggests, the Kindle (vt. Ignite; illuminate; provoke).