Author/Yimou
Source/Mantis Finance (ID: TanglangFin)
How long have you not finished reading a book?
In the era of raging knowledge anxiety, a good reading tool is no longer exclusive to literary youth. For most people, digital reading has become a mainstream.
In the past, kindle martial arts dominated the roost, followed by readers such as Palm Reader, Wenwen, Xiaomi, JD, Dangdang, etc., are all ready to move. In just a few years, China's reading market has undergone strange changes.
It seems that a reading APP without a reader is not a good platform?
Kindle kicked the door to e-reading, hardware or service?
Any consumption phenomenon cannot be separated from the rising consumer groups behind it.
In 2007, Amazon, the largest e-commerce company in the United States, launched an e-reader called "Kindle". Users can use Amazon Kindle to purchase, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and other electronic media via wireless networks.
This kindle priced at $399 was sold out within 6 hours of its release and became a phenomenal product.
Amazon took advantage of the heat and released the first Kindle DX equipped with an accelerator in 2009. It not only upgraded the hardware, but also supported PDF files to meet the diverse needs of customers for reading.
Not surprisingly, it sold out quickly again.
This phenomenon has left many people in the publishing industry stunned-why such a single-function electronic product with many defects has become the new favorite of users?
Technology concept? Amazon brand?
neither.
From today's perspective, the birth of Kindle may be a kind of helplessness.
The concept of e-books has been proposed since the 1970s, and specialized e-reader products have appeared since the 1990s. Since 2002, large manufacturers and publishers have gradually begun to digitize paper books.
It has 4 obvious advantages: 1) It is convenient to carry, and it is easy to transfer between different devices; 2) It does not require printing, and the cost will be lower after scale; 3) It can integrate many functions that are not available in paper books, such as dictionaries. , Excerpts, markings, progress, etc.; 4) No need to wait for express delivery, just buy and read.
In 2003, sales of Amazon's content products accounted for 74% of Amazon's revenue. It happened that Apple launched the iTunes music store, which, with the help of the iPod, quickly eroded Amazon's share of the music market.
This means that if Amazon does not take action, the reading market will soon be replaced by companies such as Apple and Google.
In 2004, the executive responsible for Amazon's paper book business was appointed to be in charge of e-readers. Bezos told him: "Your job is to kill your own business and make all people who sell paper books unemployed."
At the same time, Bezos began to ask Amazon Lab126 to develop a new e-reader, and borrowed heavily from the iPod concept, hoping that it "can be read with one hand", even the name Kindle means " Light up the flame", a metaphor for the excitement brought by books and wisdom.
Obviously, the birth of Kindle has obvious Internet thinking. E-readers not only represent a new way of reading, but also a new traffic portal.
This also paved the way for the rise of various e-readers in the Chinese market.
Knowledge anxiety promotes market recovery, and e-readers usher in a situation of "multiple powers contending for hegemony"
In 2013, Kindle entered the Chinese market.
However, the market environment it faces is very different from that of the United States in 2007.
In 2007, Amazon controlled the largest book sales channel in the United States, and had strong enough bargaining chips for publishers. Almost all book sales target groups were gathered on Amazon. The conversion rate was extremely high. Kindle seemed to conquer the city all the way, but it still did. In a left-handed business.
What "Mantis Finance" wants to say is that in China, the iPhone 5S is the star product in 2013, and smart phones are rapidly popularizing. China Mobile Reading, Panda Reading, Book Banner Novel, Palm Reading, Starting Point Reading, QQ Reading and other reading apps, Quickly occupy the memory of each mobile phone.
This is an era of mobile reading apps. Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, vivo, OPPO...every hardware manufacturers will force 1 to 3 reading apps when their phones leave the factory.
At the same time, the publishing market in China is also extremely chaotic, and no overlord has come out to dominate the world. Even Dangdang, which focuses on the book market, is still watching the publishers' faces. To make matters worse, the pervasive various piracy makes the industry look desperate, as if there is no future.
The result is that although Kindle has been irreplaceable for a long time, it is still not well-known in China . Just like today’s "Elvis" radio, it is more of a petty bourgeoisie in first-tier cities. Class spread.
In fact, the fate of e-readers worldwide is similar.
In 2011, global e-reader shipments reached 23.2 million units, a growth rate of over 100%, but in 2012, affected by the popularity of smart phones, lack of reading resources, and rampant piracy, global e-reader shipments dropped sharply. Global e-reader shipments have dropped sharply to 14.8 million units, and the trend of decline is obvious year by year. In 2017, global e-reader shipments were 7.15 million units, less than half of 2012 shipments.
The dramatic changes started at the end of 2016.
Since this year, paid knowledge products such as Get APP, Zhihu Live, Fenda, Himalaya 123 Knowledge Carnival, Douban Time, etc. have emerged in the market. A series of iconic events have gradually made payment of knowledge become fashionable, which lasted until 2018. At the beginning of the year, "live answering questions" pushed this atmosphere to a climax.
The rise of payment for knowledge has also planted "knowledge anxiety" into the hearts of Chinese netizens.
At the same time, China’s mobile reading market has gone through a reckless development stage, and has gradually formed giants such as reading, reading, reading more, Dangdang reading, and Baidu Literature. Electronic copyright protection has been greatly improved. Tencent’s Reading Group Become a giant in the online literature industry and listed on the Hong Kong stock market with a market value of 100 billion.
This almost marks that China has ushered in an era of quality reading.
According to the 17th National National Reading Survey, the comprehensive reading rate of my country's adult citizens in 2019 was 81.1%. Among them, 43.5% of adult citizens tend to “read on mobile phones”, 10.6% of citizens tend to “read online”, and 7.8% of citizens tend to “read on e-readers”.
In contrast to the booming digital reading, more and more readers urgently need a better reading tool. E-readers that have long standby time, simulated eye protection, and are compact and focused have become their first choice.
An interesting phenomenon is that when the kindle was first born in 2007, it was complained by traditional publishers as "eye-damaging, rough, and tasteless". In 2018, e-readers became synonymous with "eye-protection, compactness, and professionalism". .
Hu Hansan, the bully of the past, has become a good match for both heavy and light.
Such a "pure and sexy" track naturally attracts domestic Internet giants.
At present, in addition to traditional hardware manufacturers such as Hanwang, Hanlin, Dr. Yi, Edio, Fangwenfang, Datang, Taipower, Samsung, Aragonite, etc., Palmyue, Dangdang, JD.com, Wenwen, Xiaomi, Xunfei, etc. Manufacturers have also entered the game one after another, combining the content ecology, have launched their own readers.
The drama of how to compete for hegemony kicked off in the Chinese market.
E-readers have become standard equipment for bookworms, hardware or services?
Benefiting from China's complete mobile phone industry chain and open Android ecosystem, the threshold for hardware development of e-readers is not high.
Even, due to the maturity of the mobile phone manufacturing process, domestic e-readers have not looked at the kindle in terms of workmanship. In addition, in order to adapt to China’s national conditions, many brands of e-readers have access to functions such as Baidu network disk and wifi uploading books. Infused with strong competitiveness.
Kindle’s advantage has been wiped out a little bit, and then the main battlefield is the fight between domestic brands.
From the hardware side, there is no significant difference in screen size, definition, memory, etc. of digital book readers from brands such as Palm Reading, Wenwen, JD.com, and Dangdang.
From the perspective of business model, Internet access giants are all imitating kindle, adopting the closed-loop model of "hardware + content + service". For example, Reading and Palm Reading has a first-mover advantage on the content side by relying on its accumulated rich digital book resources; Dangdang, Jingdong and other traditional book e-commerce companies choose to cooperate with digital book manufacturers to launch e-readers, forming a "content + hardware" Join forces.
From the perspective of competitive strategy, the direction of most brands' competition lies in 6-inch small-screen readers, while a small number of manufacturers, such as Aragonite, Xunfei, and Ink, have taken a different approach and changed to the route of large-screen electronic paper books, focusing on professional reading, Original handwriting, productivity tools, paperless office and other concepts, seeking differentiation in file sharing, file management, comment review, PDF reading, etc. Due to the lack of reading resources, we advocate "open reading", which can install a large number of Reading APP.
If a giant enters the game, there must be a plan.
Is it like making a mobile phone, is it seizing the next hardware outlet?
No.
An e-reader is different from a mobile phone. Its flaw is that no matter how developed the ink screen is, it cannot be as smooth as a mobile phone screen. This is destined to be a single-functional product.
At present, the price of 6-inch e-readers on the market is basically between 600 and 1,200 yuan, while mid-to-high-end readers above 10 inches are between 2,000 and 4,000 yuan.
According to the forecast of Zhiyan Consulting, China's e-reader shipments will be 2.37 million units in 2020, which will increase to 2.75 million units by 2023.
Compared with smartphones, shipments of this order of magnitude can only be regarded as a fraction at best. Using Teacher Luo's discourse system, it is: "If you basically don't make money, just make friends."
The ultimate reason lies in selling content.
According to the "2019 China Digital Reading Market Research Report" released by the third-party research institution Bida Consulting, the number of digital reading users in China reached 740 million in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 1.4%. Digital reading has become a national application in China, and the market scale It will reach 20.48 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21%.
In 2019, only paper books, the per capita reading volume of Chinese adults was 4.65, while this number is 40 in Japan, 11 in South Korea, 20 in France, and 60 in Israel.
Even if it is calculated on the basis of the profit margin of 10 yuan per book, this is a vast market, and reaching the 100 billion level is not too difficult.
In particular, starting from 2019, China's demographic dividend has peaked, and the mobile reading market has grown weak, and major reading platforms have become more urgent to increase single-person content consumption.
Take Palm Reading Technology as an example. In 2019, revenue was 1.882 billion yuan, of which digital reading revenue was 1.584 billion yuan, and mobile monthly activity was 140 million people, which means that the per capita contribution revenue was only about 11.3 yuan.
This is an extremely low number. According to the 2019 financial report, Palmyue Technology's hardware product revenue in 2019 was 26 million yuan, and this part is mainly e-reader revenue.
In other words, even if the revenue generated by the e-reader hardware is very low, it cannot be underestimated. Most of its reach are deep-reading users, which is a very big promotion for the "digital reading" revenue.
Furthermore, in an era when IP and copyright operations have become a major new growth point, no electronic product can bring such a high level of loyalty and stickiness to the content ecology like an e-reader, and this is the Internet. What the giants dream of, whether it is Palm Read, Dangdang, JD, Read Wen, or manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Xunfei, this is a great temptation.
Conclusion
In Amazon's 2007 fiscal year report, Bezos told everyone not to treat Kindle as a hardware, it should become a digital service.
Anyone familiar with business history knows that once a product becomes a service, its competitive mode will no longer be the only one. Competitors can have multiple opportunities for overtaking on corners.
Going around, it seems to be back to the original point.
If the birth of kindle is a subversion of the traditional paper book market, then the fight of domestic giants should be regarded as a second revolution in the reading market.
*The pictures in this article are from the Internet
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