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English|Kindle is Staying in China, But Will its Success Story Continue?( 三 )


Challengers such as iReader, Xiaomi and BOOX might have taken some of the market shares from Kindle with products that better cater to local consumers, but they might not be able to outcompete smartphones in the digital reading sector.
English|Kindle is Staying in China, But Will its Success Story Continue?
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iReader e-reader
Kindle’s hardware might not be able to offer a satisfying user experience to consumers, it does have abundant e-book resources. According to Kindle, there are over 700,000 books on its platform. In most cases, users should be able to find the books they want to read on the Kindle Store. iReader is the only Chinese company that provides both e-reader devices and its own e-book library. It has more than 600,000 books on its platform, still a little behind Kindle.
Meanwhile, Kindle also differs from other e-reader devices because it is a supplementary device to an e-commerce platform – Amazon. This makes Kindle similar to JD.com’s JDread. In comparison, e-readers from iReader are supplementary products to mobile applications that specialize in e-books.
Both types of e-readers face a common issue – piracy. It is not yet a norm in China to pay for reading e-books on the Internet, which makes it harder for Kindle to tap into the Chinese market since it adopts a premium model. Some Kindle users would download pirated e-books and send them to their Kindle devices through Kindle’s push service.
There are plenty of free e-book resources for users to download on the Internet. To make matters worse, there are also businesses that specialize in pirating e-books. They would sell e-books that are priced at around 10~20 yuan on websites or social media platforms for only a couple of yuan.
Chinese e-readers have rolled out subscription modes such as monthly subscriptions to solve the pain point for users. E-readers that do not have their own content platform can be directly used for reading pirated e-books downloaded from the Internet.
Kindle has maintained its dominance in the e-reader market but it is no longer the must-have e-reader.
Why companies are investing in e-readers that are seemingly unnecessary?Besides the e-ink display, e-readers do not seem to have anything special to offer to consumers. But why companies continue to invest in a product that has low market demand?
“These companies are making hardware for the entire online literature market,” Zhang Yi, board chair of market research firm iiMedia said. iReader and China Literature launched their e-readers not only for the hardware market but also the entire e-book ecosystem.
Kindle is the inspiration for Chinese e-reader makers. When Kindle was first launched in the market, with each Kindle device sold, Amazon lost US$2~3. But the loss from selling Kindle did not bother Amazon because the company was looking to profit from selling digital content to users. Kindle enabled Amazon to build up a user base for its content ecosystem.
In other words, e-readers are portals to content platforms. With e-reader hardware, platforms can better promote their content or subscription to users.
Mobile reading apps are becoming very popular in China, which also helps to convert users into consumers of online literature content.
The demand and supply of digital books are growing fast in the Chinese market. It is estimated that the digital book market had reached a scale of 34.59 billion yuan in 2021. Even though the majority of users consume digital books on their smartphone, they are nonetheless potential users of e-readers.
Kindle might be used by some users for covering their cup noodles, but the market it operates in is still worth investing for hardware and content providers.
E-reader makers are designing new types of hardware to make e-readers more useful. There are already Chinese hardware makers that are making e-readers with diverse functions like a smartphone, such as note-taking, transcribing and sending emails.

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