Chinese brands such as iReader and Hanwang have already reached the Next Level, and Kindle is out of the market

Starting from June 30, Kindle China e-bookstore will stop cloud download service. Undownloaded e-books will not be available for download and reading, and users will not be able to download Kindle App from the App Store. At the same time, Kindle customer service will also stop supporting.

It only took Kindle 11 years to go from its heyday to its sad exit.

Amazon, which started out as an e-commerce company, launched the Kindle e-reader in 2007, which is considered one of Amazon's most successful hardware products. At that time, large-screen smartphones were not yet popular, and Kindle became a popular electronic product because of its unique ink electronic large screen.

Since the ink screen does not produce direct light, Kindle not only restores the reading experience of paper books, but also takes into account the function of eye protection, low power consumption and long battery life. The birth of Kindle also promoted the popularization of e-books and became Amazon's sales "dark horse".

In 2013, Kindle entered the Chinese mainland market and has gone through several versions including Paperwhite, Voyage, Oasis, etc. It also launched the Kindle Unlimited monthly e-book service, and was the first to introduce the "monthly payment" system into the e-reading market.

"In those years, pirated e-books were rampant and publishing houses had a hard time. Kindle e-books are difficult to crack due to their exclusive MOBI format, and there is copyright-sharing cooperation with publishing houses for digital books." Ms. Mo from a publishing house in Shanghai told reporters that in the most glorious years of Kindle, many publishing houses wanted to seize the e-book trend, and many popular and best-selling new books would be available in both paper and electronic versions at the same time, in the hope of achieving good sales on Kindle.

In 2016, China became the world's largest market for Kindle. In 2018, Kindle's development in China reached its peak, with annual sales exceeding one million.

Compared with other electronic products, Kindle is obviously a slow-moving product. From 2007 to now, it has only updated ten generations of products, and each update is not significant. Kindle's changes obviously cannot keep up with the times. Some users reported that problems such as "page turning lag", "page confusion" and "inconvenient book uploading" still exist after ten years of changes.

Kindle China e-book store announcement.

Gradually, Kindle was nicknamed "instant noodle lid" and gradually withdrew from major sales hot lists.

In 2022, Amazon announced that it would stop operating the Kindle e-bookstore in China one year later. On June 30, 2023, the Kindle China e-bookstore officially ceased operations. On June 30 this year, the Kindle China e-bookstore officially stopped operating.

"There are many reasons why Kindle completely withdrew from the Chinese market." Angel investor Guo Tao believes that with the booming e-book market today, Kindle's departure is a natural result of market competition.

Guo Tao said that Amazon's operating strategy in the Chinese market may be somewhat out of step with local needs and fail to fully meet the special needs of Chinese consumers. Secondly, China's e-book market is highly competitive, with many strong local competitors, such as China Literature Group and iReader Technology, which understand the local market better and provide rich Chinese content resources.

Ms. Mo feels the same way. Although the MOBI format can effectively reduce piracy, Kindle supports fewer formats and is not very compatible. More importantly, Chinese content resources are limited, and many users leave them idle at home or sell them second-hand after trying them out. The reporter saw from the second-hand market that there are many second-hand Kindles in stock, and even almost new machines are sold at only about 60% of the original price.

On March 17, 2010, a passenger reads a book on the Kindle e-reader from Amazon online bookstore in a subway car in New York, USA.

In comparison, domestic e-readers have already reached the "next level".

As Kindle's content ecosystem is too closed, the domestic ink screen company Onyx has connected to third-party content resources such as WeChat Reading, JD Reading, and Tomato Novels to create an open ecosystem. In 2023, Onyx sold hundreds of thousands of ink screen products worldwide, with annual revenue of nearly 1 billion yuan, of which overseas sales even exceeded the domestic market.

In order to solve the problem that Kindle's 6.8-inch screen is too small, domestic electronic screens are getting bigger and bigger. The latest Smart5 and X3Pro launched by iReader both have large screens of more than 10 inches. From the trend point of view, the penetration rate of color electronic screens is also increasing year by year. The online sales of the latest Leaf3C color ink screen released by Aragonite in the first four months of this year were close to 7,000 units.

According to data from semiconductor display industry monitoring agency Luotu Technology, iFlytek, iReader, and Onyx ranked among the top three in domestic online sales in 2023, with sales exceeding 100,000 units, with year-on-year growth rates of 55.5%, 15.5%, and 19.1%, respectively.

"With the popularization of smartphones and other mobile devices, users' e-book reading habits may be more inclined to use multi-functional devices, reducing the demand for dedicated e-book readers." Guo Tao said that the domestic e-book market is currently developing rapidly, and e-books still have potential as a business, especially in promoting digital publishing, reducing publishing costs, and facilitating users' access to content.

The latest "21st National Reading Survey Report" shows that in 2023, the average paper book reading volume of Chinese adults is 4.75, and the average e-book reading volume is 3.40, totaling 8.15, higher than 8.11 in 2022. In 2023, 78.3% of adults have read on their mobile phones, up 0.5% year-on-year. Emerging digital reading methods such as listening to books and video narration are becoming more and more popular among adults, with 36.3% of adults reading by listening to books.

The digital reading market is growing, but the e-ink screen market is still under pressure. In 2023, the domestic sales of e-ink screens will only be around 1.23 million units, which is still a niche market compared to the tablet market.

Looking at the domestic e-book market, in addition to traditional e-readers such as iReader Technology, iFLYTEK, and Hanwang Technology, platforms such as WeChat Reading, JD Reading, and Chinese Online also provide online reading services. Mobile devices such as mobile phones are the main battlefield for e-books.

"Although the market size may not be as large as that of devices such as smartphones, e-book readers still have a certain appeal to users who pursue high-quality reading experience." Guo Tao believes that electronic ink technology can meet the needs of specific users and should be improved in terms of display effects and interactive functions.

Judging from the transformation of leading companies such as iReader and Hanwang, e-book readers are evolving from reading devices into comprehensive readable and writable hardware, exploring more office and learning scenarios.

At present, some domestic manufacturers have integrated AI big models into e-readers, which can help users quickly organize their learning and work ideas and form a clear knowledge framework. Nowadays, in addition to reading books, domestic high-end e-readers now have office functions such as translation, recording, and document processing as standard.