Another epoch-making "artifact" is about to say goodbye to us!
According to the official news of "Amazon China", from June 30, 2024, the Kindle China e-book store will stop the cloud download service, and the e-books that have not been downloaded after this will not be able to be downloaded and read. This news also rushed to the hot search on the same day!
Image source: Amazon.com
According to the Shenjiang Service Herald, many netizens seem to be helpless to "lament" "This is really only the instant noodle cover", it seems that after the iPad, a real "instant noodle artifact" is about to be born! Some netizens also think that "it is really not very convenient to use".
Image source: Shenjiang Service Herald
Although it was complained by many netizens, some netizens gave it a positive comment, "Thank you Kindle for your companionship over the years, it's really very easy to use." Some netizens hit the nail on the head and called the cessation of Kindle updates "the tears of the times".
Image source: Southern Metropolis Daily
Exit from the domestic market, there is a plan for a long time
In fact, from the beginning of the "wind and grass" to the official "break" from the domestic market, the Kindle has taken almost two years, but what should come will still come after all!
According to official information, at the end of October 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.
However, users who have previously purchased eBooks can download them until June 30, 2024, and can continue reading. 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.
Timeline for the withdrawal of Kindle from the domestic market
Image source: Official
Back in 2007, it was the iPhone launched by Mr. Qiao that changed the mobile phone and was in the limelight, and the Kindle launched in the same year could not be said to compete with the iPhone for eyeballs, but it could also be said to be an epoch-making product. In November of that year, Amazon launched the first-generation Kindle, which was limited to reading and was initially sold only in the U.S. market, selling out within six hours of being on the shelves.
It is understood that unlike other electronic devices such as mobile phones, which rely on the backlight of the LCD screen, Kindle uses white and black electronic ink to mix gray scale, and relies on sunlight reflection into the human eye, which is why reading paper books is almost the same as reading Kindle. It is by relying on white and black electronic ink to mix colors, so the degree of gray scale is very high. At present, there are very few competitors that can achieve a similar level of technology.
The technical excellence is the hole card of the Kindle's "hard gas". In the eyes of Amazon founder Bezos, this is a "classic" he pushes and an idealistic practice. In 2012, it publicly stated that "we sell hardware at cost price, and the hardware is offset", in other words: hardware does not make money, but relies on the content ecology to make money.
This line of thinking does have a somewhat familiar flavor: in September of the same year, a businessman who was born as an accountant made an appointment for a 5-minute conversation with the chairman of Hon Hai, who is also a native of Shanxi, under the recommendation of a friend. After talking about the development trend of future TV and his own ecological vision, he got the opportunity to further discuss in the private room of the 101 Building. This may be the source of the idea of "ecological anti-transformation".
In 2013, the Kindle officially entered the Chinese market. Highly sought after by users. Especially from 2016 to 2018, Kindle, as a rare high-quality e-reader brand in the domestic market, experienced a highlight moment.
According to Amazon's official data in China, in 2016, the third year of Kindle's entry into China, it has become Amazon's largest market for global Kindle device sales, and from 2013 to 2018, Kindle has sold millions of units in China. At that time, the total number of Kindle e-book stores in China was nearly 700,000, an increase of nearly 10 times compared to 2013.
But behind the highlights, there is a hidden fatal risk, and whether you can see this risk depends on the degree of grasp of business logic! According to Sina Technology, as early as 2011, when Kindle was booming in the world and had not yet entered China, Liu Qiangdong asserted that "it is impossible for Kindle to make money in China", and even said that "let Amazon's Bezos also come to China to start a business, give him two billion US dollars, and he will not be able to burn a Kindle".
The key reason for Liu's judgment is that "as long as there is piracy in it, the Kindle model will never succeed in China." These words can't be said to be in one sentence, at least they also grasp part of the logic - you must know that Dongge has experienced so many ups and downs, and his understanding of domestic business and even human nature is beyond the reach of many people.
The truth is late: since its peak in 2016, the Kindle has quickly gone downhill in the Chinese market. The reason can be found in both internal and external aspects!
Whose fault is the decline of Kindle?
The first is external factors. As the saying goes, "fast fish eat slow fish", the reason why the former Kindle stood out from the crowd was because of the leading idea in product design, so that there were no competitors in the industry, but a few years later, Xiaomi, Palmyue, Huawei, iFLYTEK and other companies have a number of competing products, and continue to eat the market cake of Kindle!
Compared with Kindle, even if there is still a gap in the realism of e-ink, these friends can obviously accurately grasp the psychology of domestic consumers, especially young readers, in terms of content production. The explosion of literature in the new era, represented by online novels, has made the number of readers on these platforms reach a new high.
So what types of novels are mainly popular on these platforms? For example: In 2021, "Nanfeng Window" once reported that the number one novel on the best-selling list on a certain platform is "The Door-to-door Son-in-law of the Female President". Just imagine, if you are a 996 migrant worker who has been tired for a day, in the few times that belong to you before going to bed at night, what can bring you the warmth of your soul is those philosophical and historical works that are condescending, or cool essays that can boil your blood? Of course, insomnia is a different story.
According to this logic, it is not other competitors that have really revolutionized this kind of e-book, but the booming short videos! Now, whether on the subway or in the shopping mall, there are a few people who are still reading books, and they are not all holding their mobile phones and frequently swiping them over - the fast-paced and efficient fragmented way of obtaining information is the killer of e-book products!
Let's take another example, compared with exquisite dishes, what can move the hearts of Liangshan heroes more is obviously the boldness of "eating meat in large pieces and drinking wine in large bowls". It also illustrates the importance of meeting the needs of prospective customers from one side.
The challenges encountered by Kindle in China also include the copyright issue of "adapting to the water and soil" in China: Bezos's early mention of "Kindle relies on value-added services to make money, not hardware", has become an almost impossible task in the domestic environment. When piracy was most common, Taobao was overwhelmed with sellers who "downloaded on behalf of others", and the original price of books was only a few tens of yuan, and all kinds of groups were endless. Liu Qiangdong deserves to be a prophet!
Compared with copyright issues, the "dimensionality reduction attack" of genuine content is the last straw that crushes the camel. Taking the wealthy WeChat Reading as an example, backed by the giant tree of WeChat, the breadth and depth of the content it provides is probably unparalleled on the entire network platform, coupled with the low price (a very small monthly membership fee, you can read most of the books), it is a complete "whirlwind" blow to platforms including Kindle!
According to the relevant data of iResearch, due to the impact of the free reading model, the proportion of paid revenue of users in the domestic online literature market decreased from 84.2% in 2016 to 74.1% in 2020, while advertising revenue increased from 1.9% in 2016 to 15% in 2020. And now, four years later, with the rise of short videos, I believe this data will be more severe.
If the impact of the outside world is the inevitable decline of the e-book industry, the "lack of progress" of the Kindle itself has opened up the acceleration mode for its decline. The first is the appearance: in this colorful world, the Kindle reader still adheres to the values of black and white, which may not be too much of a problem for the pure text world, but to reflect the real world, it is difficult not to be distorted!
The second is the singularity of functions. Take WeChat Reading as an example, those who have used it know that it has rich functions: not only convenient reading, but also you can see the reading ranking of friends, the books that friends are reading recently, as well as other people's book summaries, and wonderful comments on paragraphs - many comments are exclusively displayed by WeChat Reading, which has both reading and social dual attributes, while Kindle, on the other hand, the social function is almost blank, and it is difficult to "ecologically reverse" in this regard.
Under the "internal and external troubles", it is not difficult to understand that Kindle is "unadaptable" in the domestic market. It is not difficult to imagine why the Kindle will be listed as the third "most useless" product of the year in the sales list launched by Xianyu in 2021, second only to air fryers and treadmills, which also laid the groundwork for its ending today.
Kindle is a "wheat city" in China, which cannot represent Amazon
Not only Kindle, Amazon's e-commerce seems to have been sluggish in China in recent years: as early as 2019, Amazon closed its Chinese online store because its e-commerce business was beaten all over the place by local brands. At that time, many books were sold at very low prices, and the author even stocked up on a lot. At present, Amazon's remaining business in the Chinese market includes cross-border e-commerce, advertising and cloud services.
But if you take Kindle's domestic "walking wheat city" as an example and think that Amazon is going downhill, you are very wrong. According to Amazon's financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024: net sales were $143.313 billion, a year-on-year increase of 13%; The net profit was 10.431 billion US dollars, a significant increase of 229% year-on-year!
Stimulated by bright financial reports and hot spots such as artificial intelligence, Amazon's stock price has risen recently, and its market value has recently exceeded the $2 trillion mark for the first time.
Image source: Oriental Fortune Network
Kindle's withdrawal from the country has not affected Amazon's rise in the slightest, and it seems that the analysis of the problem at any time needs to be considered holistically, and it cannot be blinded - this is the case for analyzing companies, and even more so for analyzing industries, regions and even countries, and it cannot be led off the pace.
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