According to the official website of Amazon China, from June 30, 2024, the Kindle China e-book store will stop the cloud download service, and e-books that have not been downloaded after this will not be able to be downloaded and read. Once a subversion of the existence of paper books, now the Kindle, the star product of e-readers, has finally come to an end in China.
Regarding this news, many netizens ridiculed, "I can really only cover instant noodles now" and "instant noodle partner", and some netizens sighed that "the first e-reader I bought was Kindle".
In fact, as early as 2022, Amazon released the "Kindle China E-book Store Operation Adjustment", announcing that it would stop the operation of the Kindle e-book store in China after one year.
On June 30, 2023, according to the notice issued by Amazon's Kindle service account, the operation of the Kindle e-book store in China was officially stopped, and users can no longer purchase new e-books after that. According to the notice, for e-books that users have previously purchased, they can download them until June 30, 2024, and they can continue to read them. E-books and personal documents stored on Kindle devices will not be affected. Kindle customer service in China will also continue until June 30, 2024.
On June 30, 2023, the day of the shutdown, some media conducted a small random survey of users who owned Kindle, and 75% of the respondents said that the frequency of use of Kindle after buying it was very low, and they basically put it on hold to "eat soil", and usually use their mobile phones more to read e-books and listen to books. Due to the increasing abundance of free book resources on the Internet, more than half of the respondents said that they rarely enter Kindle's e-book store to buy books, so the closure of this sector of business has not had much impact on them.
The Kindle eReader was born in 2007 and is considered one of Amazon's most successful hardware products. Thanks to the use of an e-paper screen, the Kindle is considered eye-friendly and easy to read, combining the experience of a paper book with the convenience of an e-reader. In the years following the Kindle e-reader, e-books became one of Amazon's fastest-growing categories and set off a global e-book reading boom.
In 2013, Kindle officially entered China and once became synonymous with e-books, favored by many literary and artistic youths. In 2018, the development of Kindle readers in China reached its peak, with annual sales exceeding one million.
Amazon has actively sought to expand its Kindle business in China, and in 2018 an internal Amazon document said that by the end of 2017, China had become the largest market for Kindle, with devices selling more than 40% of the global market share.
However, with the acceleration of 4G and 5G network coverage in China, the demand for e-book readers in China has fallen sharply. According to the analysis of some research institutions, due to the convenience of obtaining free e-books and the low printing cost in China, the commercial value of the Kindle store is limited.
Amazon has said in its official statement that it is adjusting its business strategic focus and that other business lines in China will continue. "Amazon China's long-term commitment to customers will not change. We have established an extensive business base in China and will continue to innovate and invest. The company's statement said.
In addition, Amazon also closed its Chinese online store in 2019 due to the sluggish performance of its online retail business. The Company's remaining businesses in China include cross-border e-commerce, advertising and cloud services, among others.
China Business Daily is synthesized from China Youth Daily, Red Star News, China Business News, etc