PcoNline
In recent days, rumours of kindle's withdrawal from china have brought many kindle fans together. Some netizens have found that there is a massive shortage of goods at the kindle shop in kyoto, and there are rumours that the kindle hardware team was abolished last november, which seems to mean that kindle is leaving the chinese market. Subsequently, in an official response in the amazon, consumers could purchase kindle equipment through third parties and customer and warranty services would not change。
There's a general shortage of supplies at kindle, either in the amazon or in kyoto
It follows that the rumor that kindle left china is not true, and that kindle will continue to sell on the chinese market and the corresponding services will continue to operate. However, much of the truth about this rumour is due to the fact that kindle is less hot than before. Even though a significant number of people have been forced to live in their homes for a long time during the epidemic, it is understood that the share of e-books continues to decline, compared with the share of entertainment such as short video, which has increased significantly. This means that electronic books, including kindle, are less popular。
Compared to 2019, the share of e-books in the reading market declined in 2020 (data from erie consulting)
Why is the e-book boom retreating? Why is the e-book business getting harder and harder? Just talk about it。
How can the e-books get hot
Before talking about e-books, we need to understand how e-books (mainly kindle) are making a difference. The advantages of e-books are obvious: convenience. The advantages of e-book accessibility as compared to substantive books can be seen in several ways。
:: purchase convenience. This is the obvious advantage of electronic books as opposed to physical books, which are simply purchased directly on the web page, so that electronic books can be delivered to the equipment, which is much less costly than the material books may need to be supplied by logistics or even from time to time。
It's very convenient to buy an electronic book and send it directly to kindle equipment or kindle app
:: readability. It is easier to read e-books by opening a device such as kindle or a cell phone, tablet, which is heavier than a substantive book and does not delay reading outside. At the same time, e-books can be synchronized across devices and can continue to be read at the same pace on mobile phones even if kindle is forgotten。
Electronic books can be read on multiple devices and synchronize reading progress
:: storage convenience. It's almost impossible for you to have the same collection of real books。
:: accessibility of updates. If there were new editions of books and some revisions of content, such as corrections, electronic books might be updated, while real books could only buy new editions, rather than electronic books。
The convenient advantage of electronic books is ultimately the advantage of digital products. Why is the share of electronic books declining? This relates to some changes in the e-book itself in recent years, as well as to some features of the e-book itself。
The electronic book market is facing bottlenecks
However, convenience is not a panacea; otherwise, it cannot be explained why access has never been the norm. At the present time, it is clear that the growth of e-books has encountered bottlenecks, which have revealed many problems, many of which are actually encountered by kindle in the current market。
Reduced price advantage. As a digital product, the cost of an electronic book is naturally lower than the cost of a real book, and the price is supposed to be a great advantage. In recent years, however, the price of e-books has risen significantly, with dozens of dollars of e-books being widely sold, and the competitiveness of e-books has been significantly reduced by comparison with the many physical libraries that often make discounts on the internet, even with little price advantage。
This book, for example, is $19. 90 for kindle's e-book
But in some online library city, the same books cost only $16. 49
Low quality of content. This is probably the biggest shortboard of electronic books. For a long time, the layout of e-books, the quality of pictures, and so on, have not been as significant as that of real books, and it is not uncommon for an e-book to be well-formulated, text-based, possibly electronicized, or photo-quality. This even affects the normal reading of books。
It's an electronic version of cambridge art, purchased by the author in kindle mall
For example, some of the specialized books related to programming, the code layout of electronicization is distorted and even unreadable, which amounts to a dead book; for example, books related to art, images of works of art after electronicization are so messed up, and high-level illustrations of physical books are so different。
Poor reading experience. E-books are easier to read than real books, but their short board is material. Even a paper book does not have the same reading experience as a real book, such as a high-resolution illustration of a copper version of paper, which cannot be restored. And the screens on the cell phone, the tablets, do not allow for paper quality. If the focus is on reading experience, e-books are still not comparable to real books。
Kindle's device has no sense of quality, tablets have no sense of quality, it's always not as perfect as real books
:: undefined ownership. Although electronic books are more easily stored than entity books, there is a high risk that users will not have ownership of the books. For example, in the case of the kindle store, there has been a case where an electronic book on a device has been deleted after a book has been placed, which is unacceptable to many readers. At present, there is still no definitive conclusion as to the attribution of digital rights to electronic books, and it is not safe to see that half of the books are suddenly removed from the shelf, and that this will not happen。
• piracy across the board. The piracy of electronic books is very common, with pirated users diverting a large part of the electronic book market, seriously affecting the normal collection of electronic books。
Now, e-books are in a bad position. We can broadly divide reading into general entertainment for reading pleasures and a serious one with a strong purpose and value from books. The current reality is that e-books are unwelcome in both reading-oriented populations。
First of all, in today's diverse forms of entertainment, the reading population has been diverted from the more rapid forms of entertainment such as games and short videos. In fact, the impact is not just on e-books, but on the entire market, where the entertainment attraction of e-books and real books is a huge and unprecedented challenge。
In other words, a very large proportion of those who are reading today are actually having a strong purpose and trying to gain practical value from books, such as reading professional books. However, the low-quality layout of e-books has had a serious impact on the readability of professional books, which is not repeated in the examples of code layouts and art illustrations given earlier. Thus, a serious reader tends to buy real books, which in turn affects the growth rate of e-book users。
The decline in the number of users of e-books has resulted in a lack of economies of scale and higher prices for e-books, as well as cost of improving their layouts, while poor layouts have allowed users to flee e-books... Adding to the high rates of piracy, there are increasingly insufficient benefits to drive book publishers to improve the quality of their books, or even to electronicize their books, which in turn makes them less, less and less quality, less and less effective in scale ... This is approaching a vicious circle。
Summary
How do e-books escape from the current difficulties? The cost has always been the immeasurable long board of e-books, while reading experience has been the short board of e-books that cannot be matched by physical books. It is not necessarily difficult to re-heat the e-book market if it is always possible to insist on the sale of e-books at a low price, continuously renewing the electronic paper equipment, popularizing high ppi and high-coloured e-ink screens, improving the quality of the layout of e-books while ensuring effective protection against piracy and clarifying digital rights to e-books. Can kindle do all this? We'll see。
