Hello, I am Wang Yuquan, here is Wang Yuquan important news comment.
On June 2, Amazon China announced that it will stop the operation of the Kindle e-bookstore in the Chinese market on June 30, 2023.
This means that you can't buy new eBooks on the Kindle later. The Kindle is an e-reader designed and sold by Amazon, the first generation was launched in 2007, entered China in 2013 and has been operating in China for 9 years.
Regarding the withdrawal of the Kindle, some people think that there are many domestic companies, such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and iFLYTEK, which have also made e-book readers and squeezed out the Kindle; Some people also think that it is not suitable for the domestic market, the water and soil are not satisfied, and the price of its e-book version is not competitive; Of course, some people have linked Airbnb's withdrawal from the Chinese market the other day, and it feels that the logic of decoupling is at work.
These analyses all sound plausible, but I think we can dig a little deeper and find the underlying logic of this product and business to see it more fully.
The Kindle reader is not a tablet that can include many applications like the iPad, but a single device with simple functions. It is a closed system, can not install other applications, all functions are designed for reading, including electronic ink screen, word prompt function, intelligent color temperature adjustment and so on.
Compared with tablets, the Kindle is not a smart electronic product, but an industry driven by book copyright. If you only rely on selling hardware readers, the profit is very small, the main way to make money is the subscription service "Kindle Unlimited", which is $9.99 per month and can read any book in the library of 2 million books without restriction.
Amazon also offers creators the Kindle Direct Publishing service, which allows creators to bypass traditional publishing houses and publish directly on kindle. Readers who have purchased a Kindle monthly subscription can read these self-published books, and Amazon divides writers based on the number of pages they read.
Such a low-threshold publishing method has created a group of full-time Kindle best-selling authors, many of whom have simply published directly on the Kindle. In 2019, Amazon awarded $290 million to writers who published books on the Kindle, and the number of books published through "self-publishing" has exceeded 2 million.
While Amazon has never announced the number of people who subscribe to the Kindle reading service, some data analysts have made an estimate that as of June 2021, at least 3 million people in the United States have subscribed to kindle, of which 74% of subscribers read more than 5 books a month. It seems that it still has a high degree of popularity in the United States.
Why does such a great product in the US market not work in China?
The inability to replicate the American model in the publishing business is one aspect, and more importantly, The Kindle ultimately offers users a single, reading-only product.
Competitors such as WeChat reading and app acquisition in the Chinese market know more about the needs of users to obtain knowledge and provide more direct services. If Kindle only provides products, then getting App and WeChat reading is to provide services, behind which is a strong operating model.
For example, not only did it cooperate with well-known publishing houses to put more than 50,000 books on the shelves of the library, but also carefully selected more than 2,900 books, each of which took 20 minutes to interpret it, that is, the listening service, which met the needs of modern people to use fragmented time to obtain knowledge.
The rise of listening platforms such as Himalayas and Dragonfly FM has also changed the reading habits of many people. According to the 2020 China Digital Reading Report, the average reading time of users using electronic devices is 80 minutes, and the audio reading time accounts for 60 minutes.
The United States does not have such a mature knowledge services market as China, and although there are some startups that operate, such as Blinkist, which has raised $34 million, and has transcribed more than 4,000 books into 15 minutes of audio each, it is not large and has not had an impact on The Kindle so far.
Not only the operation of knowledge services, Kindle's understanding of the needs of domestic users is also very insufficient. In this regard, WeChat reading is even better, backed by WeChat's social relationship chain, jumping directly from APP to WeChat, combined with WeChat ecological drainage and dissemination, there are constantly new ways to play; In terms of content layout, online literature is a very popular section on WeChat reading, and data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that there are as many as 460 million online literature users in the mainland.
This is the market that Kindle ignored, although it has been tried before, in 2017, in cooperation with the online literary platform Migu Reading at the time, launched a customized version, putting the Kindle system and the Migu system in a device at the same time, but did not fully open the system, and then it was gone.
Simply put, the success of kindle in the United States is because it is backed by the huge publishing market in the United States, and it is an upgraded version of paper books; While China's traditional publishing market is not big enough, the core of the emerging knowledge payment is to transmit and share knowledge, and the key lies in operation rather than reader. Directly copying American products to China will naturally be unsatisfactory.
In the face of different markets, there must be different ways of playing, and if any company wants to be global, the premise is to be localized, to understand the unique needs of local users, and to respond quickly to user needs. Instead of providing a cookie-cutter product to users around the world like Kindle, localization in China has been very unsuccessful.
This is also a reminder to all technology companies, in the process of meeting the needs of users to find ways to provide services, rather than a single product, to have the ability to solidify the product into the service, only to provide users with a perfect service experience of the enterprise can have the broadest future.
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