All aspects of Kindle's entry into China

Amazon said on June 7 that it will start selling two Kindle products in China. At present, the company is gradually expanding the range of products sold in the Chinese market. A spokesman for the company confirmed that it will sell the Kindle Fire HD tablet and Kindle Paper white e-reader in China, and hardware sales in the Chinese market will officially start. China has become one of the largest mobile device markets in the world.

There is no overwhelming publicity, no gorgeous press conference, but kindle has undoubtedly created a whirlwind in China. After 48 hours, many Suning brick-and-mortar stores in Beijing were out of stock, and Amazon's delivery man said that he would send the kindle to his legs.

Amazon's move sparked heated discussions in the market. Can Kindle products capture the existing consumer market? Kindle enters China at this time, is the time ripe? Will a new round of "battle" begin?

In general, the domestic market does not have a good prospect for Kindle entering China. optimism.

The most successful element of Kindle is cloud-based digital content. Amazon, which started out selling books, has completely changed the publishing industry in Europe and the United States, becoming the world's largest online digital bookstore, and has also cultivated hundreds of millions of paying readers. However, this necessary condition has never been established in China, such as copyright issues, policy issues, partner issues, and piracy issues. China is still a jungle of digital content, and Amazon has always been locked out of it.

On the product side, an important factor was the timing of the Kindle's birth. In the era of non-smartphones, Kindle can almost kill all other e-readers and e-books. However, when the iPad is popular, coupled with a large number of 4.5-6.3-inch large-screen mobile phones spawned by Android, the positioning of the Kindle has become very embarrassing. The trend among consumers to move away from dedicated e-book readers is partly due to the limited functionality of these readers. Devices such as Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and other devices running Google's Android operating system already have color displays and full-fledged web browsing.

And the price gap between tablets and e-readers is shrinking, making them more attractive to consumers. For most consumers, an all-purpose tablet is a better choice, especially at a time when tablets are cheap and e-readers may end up being a niche product.

In terms of cost, the problem that Kindle needs to face is the high cost of e-book production. At present, the production cost of each e-book on Amazon costs more than 1,000 yuan. According to the current download volume of nearly 50,000 copies, the production cost of e-books is close to 50 million yuan. If the Kindle is not recognized by the majority of consumers, Amazon's e-books The business in China will be the same as the e-commerce business, which will be in an environment of fierce competition and difficult to make profits for a long time.

Environmentally, another very important point is the issue of piracy. Although China's Internet piracy environment has improved in recent years, for example, videos and music have gradually become legalized, but book piracy is still very serious. For example, video and music have begun to gradually become legalized, but book piracy is still very serious. It is reported that the production cost of each e-book on Amazon currently costs more than 1,000 yuan. According to the current download volume of nearly 50,000 copies, the cost of e-book production costs nearly 50 million yuan. When can such a cost be recovered?

In terms of the market, in China's e-commerce market, Amazon almost no longer has the opportunity to make a comeback. Tmall is thriving, JD.com follows closely, and third-tier manufacturers represented by Suning, Amazon, and Yixun compete fiercely, while Amazon, which has been sluggish, has repeatedly changed coaches and does not pay enough attention to the Chinese market, which has exhausted its first-mover advantage. When Chinese manufacturers continue to expand their categories and deliver N deliveries in one day, Amazon's only remaining logistics advantage is no longer obvious. In the field of e-commerce where the "Matthew effect" is obvious, Amazon has lost the present and basically lost the future.

In China, Amazon has not taken the lead. There are various reading bases of communication operators in the past, and various participants in the publishing industry chain are encircled and suppressed. Kindle's entry into China has sparked sniping from domestic competitors.

Although many comments are not optimistic about the Kindle's prospects, after its entry into China, the Chinese market is indeed booming. The most entangled is the existing practitioners in the domestic market. On the one hand, they hope that Kindle can promote the development of digital reading in China, and on the other hand, they do not want Kindle to seize their market share.

On June 7, Hanwang Technology launched the Golden House dry light e-book reader. At 4:00 p.m., Hanwang announced that the price of the product is 849 yuan, which is exactly the same as the price of Kindle paper white. The person in charge of public relations said that the product was planned at the end of last year, just in time for the launch of Amazon's Kindle.

Dangdang also followed closely and announced the official pre-sale of the first touch-screen e-reader "Dukan 2" at a price of 699 yuan, which is 150 yuan cheaper than Kindle paper white. Yu Meng, senior manager of Dangdang.com, said, "Everyone is paying attention to each other. Dangdang has electronic paper book terminals, shopping malls, and content, which are similar to Amazon. Therefore, kindle is our only competitor."

But from an experience point of view, At present, the existing e-book experience in China is still relatively poor compared to Kindle. Hu Xiaodong, vice president of Duokan, believes that for a long time, generations of Chinese followers of Amazon have often learned about it only in form, not God. Amazon's powerful and complete data Collection, analysis and management mechanisms, as well as service models based on user personalized management are difficult to replicate.

For such an intense e-book competition, some commented that despite the changing trend, dedicated e-book readers still have some selling points. For example, these readers tend to be lighter than most tablets, and different display styles extend battery life. There have also been some major improvements in e-book readers, including the use of touchscreen technology and a backlit screen. In addition, the price of e-book readers has dropped significantly, with the Kindle for advertising starting as low as $69.

According to people familiar with Amazon, in addition to hardware equipment, Amazon's competition in China's e-books mainly depends on the quality and reading experience of e-books. At present, Amazon's production cost per e-book is close to thousands of yuan, and in the short term Kindle There will also be no marketing campaigns and large-scale confrontation with competitors.

The above-mentioned people also believe that the entry of Kindle in China will promote the cultivation of the reading market. For example, white-collar workers and students of petty bourgeoisie culture will all be Kindle users. In addition, Kindle will also occupy a certain share in the gift market.

Dangdang Vice President Wang Xi revealed at a forum that although Dangdang's book audio and video revenue reached 3.25 billion yuan last year, the revenue from e-books was only 3 million yuan. This also means that the e-book industry has great potential for development in China.

The relevant person in charge of Hanwang once said that there are not many players in the domestic e-book market at present. The entry of Kindle is beneficial to the entire e-reading industry, and everyone can work together to expand the market.

In fact, Amazon has been quietly preparing for Kindle's entry into China for a year. In November last year, the Kindle software system began to support Chinese. On December 13 last year, Amazon China added the "Kindle Store" category on its website, and launched free Kindle reading software and Kindle e-book downloads, covering almost all book sales, including many such as "The Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling", Bestsellers such as The Biography of Jobs also offer discounts ranging from 30% to 20%.

Rumours of Kindle entering China are not new, and similar news has been circulating two years ago. However, because the Kindle needs to be approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the General Administration of Press and Publication of China, the two sides also need to communicate repeatedly on channels and price cooperation, which delays the release time. Some analysts believe that there are still many risks and resistances for the development of Kindle in China.

The biggest obstacle to Kindle's entry into China has always been the lack of electronic publication licenses. E-books are composed of hardware and back-end e-book content platforms. It is relatively easy for foreign hardware products to enter the Chinese market, but audio-visual products and electronic publications are strictly controlled by the state. The Ministry of Commerce's "Foreign Investment Industry Guidance Catalog" stipulates that foreign companies are strictly prohibited from intervening. .

In order to engage in related business activities, domestic companies must apply for and obtain an Internet publishing license (license), and as an American company, Amazon Kindle faces this insurmountable obstacle. According to industry insiders, the person in charge of Amazon China has visited the State Press and Publication Administration many times to discuss solutions to the license issue, but has been unsuccessful.

So in terms of policy, since the news and publishing industry has always been a highly sensitive and policy-oriented industry in China, the license issue for the online operation of Amazon's kindle content store was solved by the Chinese online operation model, but this is undoubtedly in the Scrambling with existing regulatory policies.

With the introduction of Kindle hardware into China, Amazon's most competitive cloud service will inevitably follow, and the complexity of supervision will increase greatly. Whether Kindle's content services will comply with China's Internet laws and regulations in the future will be a major problem for Amazon to reassure relevant government departments.

For the Kindle, the challenge is not just licensing, but piracy. Since 2012, Amazon China has begun to sell Kindle e-books and released reading software suitable for mobile phones and tablets, but another invisible market has emerged immediately - several cracked versions of Amazon e-books have appeared on Taobao, and a gray industry chain has been formed. .

"There is a sound integrity system in foreign markets, so there is no room for piracy, but piracy has always existed in China, and piracy has become the most important task for many domestic e-book companies, and Amazon's encryption technology in China is obviously still lagging behind. The ability to pirate, this has become its soft underbelly." An industry insider said.

The success of Amazon's e-books is due to the publishing and distribution mechanism of hardcover and platform books in the United States. Paperbacks are often released one year after the sales of hardcovers, while e-books with the same price as paperbacks are released at the same time as hardcovers. . It can also be seen from the data that after the popularity of Kindle e-books, the number of hardcover books has not declined, while the paperback market has been greatly impacted.

In terms of book content, due to historical problems, many publishing institutions have insufficient digital foundation, and the data sources are mixed, and the format conversion itself will make mistakes. More often, the scanned PDF files are directly converted by OCR, with typos and wrong paragraphs. Missing words and missing words are very common, as for the lack of pictures or even the cover. And because the Chinese layout itself is complex and changeable, in terms of layout, the layout of Western books is simple and has few changes. 95% of the books are pure text, not to mention pictures and texts, and even the fonts do not change much, but modern China. The layout emphasizes the mix of pictures and texts and font changes. The "reading thinking habit" formed by the layout is deeply ingrained in the Chinese mind. These two reasons also make it difficult to pursue a "big and complete" scale, standardization, and industrialized operation mode.

In terms of user experience, Kindle's main product uses black and white electronic ink technology, which has the characteristics of low power consumption and no eye damage, and is a good experience for deep reading users. However, it also has shortcomings such as slow response speed and jerky touch screen operation. When Kindle was popular, the expressiveness and performance of mobile phones were still very weak. Today, when everyone's must-have mobile phones are becoming more and more powerful, when gorgeous colors, rich multimedia expressiveness and smooth gesture operations have deepened. How many people are willing to return to the era of black and white?