Vì sao Kindle đánh mất thị trường Trung Quốc?

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With its industry-leading hardware, good service, and publisher support, the Kindle seemed poised for success in China, but Amazon was never able to build on its early lead. The Kindle didn’t die in China last month, but slowly, over the course of a decade. As the Chinese e-book market changed and evolved (phát triển, tiến hóa), the Kindle did not. It offered no new surprises and made no adjustments (điều chỉnh) to better fit the habits (thói quen) of Chinese readers (người đọc).

Don’t get me wrong; the Kindle remains an excellent (tuyệt vời) e-reader. But in a highly competitive (cạnh tranh cao) Chinese market saturated (bão hòa) with niche brands (thương hiệu ngách), it was rarely (hiếm khi) the best option (lựa chọn tốt nhất) for any given user. For academics (học thuật), brands like Boox and Dasung offer desktop-sized e-ink screens meant for reading PDFs. At the other end of the spectrum are lightweight, iPhone-sized e-readers from companies like Moaan, which call to mind popular (phổ biến), pocketable (bỏ túi) bunkobon Japanese paperbacks (sách giấy). A few Chinese brands have even introduced (giới thiệu, áp dụng) color e-ink screens for reading comics (truyện tranh) or full-color books.

Not helping the Kindle’s case was Amazon’s “walled garden” approach to the platform’s software. Buying a Kindle locks (khóa) you into Amazon’s ecosystem (hệ sinh thái), whereas most competing e-book readers in China run Android. It’s easy to pick up a locally developed e-reader with multiple built-in reading apps, covering almost all major Chinese e-book companies.

This diversity (đa dạng) is particularly important when accessing (tiếp cận) one of China’s most important and profitable (có lợi nhuận, sinh lời) digital publishing (xuất bản số) industries: online fiction (hư cấu). Take a subway or bus anywhere in China, and odds are that at least one of your fellow passengers will be reading a web novel, whether it’s a tale of martial arts, fantasy, or urban romance. Although Kindle secured an agreement with the major online literature publisher China Literature to offer a selection of its online novels, Amazon never treated online literature as a major focus.

I’m not sure why the Kindle neglected online fiction, but the choice signaled Amazon’s growing distance from Chinese users. As did the platform’s poor smartphone support. In a country where most readers use apps as their primary e-book platform, Kindle’s lack of features common on Chinese services like social networking and social media (mạng xã hội) integration (tích hợp) suggested that Amazon put too much emphasis on hardware over software. Even many Kindle users I know told me they didn’t know there was a Kindle app until they read about it in the withdrawal announcement. Meanwhile, Amazon’s lack of browser support for its e-books in China and poor notes compatibility frustrated users accustomed to more open ecosystems.

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