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On June 30, Kindle China e-bookstore stopped cloud download service. Undownloaded e-books will not be available for download and reading, and users will not be able to download Kindle App from the App Store. At the same time, Kindle customer service will also stop supporting.

But a month later, old Kindle users across the entire network carried out maintenance on their own, which unexpectedly ignited new Kindle business.

In 2007, when Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, officially released the iPhone at the Mac World Conference held in San Francisco, Amazon had just launched the first generation of Kindle e-book reader. The two originally unrelated products showed a trend of one rising and the other falling in the future - in 2023, when Apple won the global sales crown of smartphones, Kindle had already closed its e-book store in China.

Back in 2007, the electronic ink screen technology used by Kindle unexpectedly combined the experience of paper books with the convenience of e-readers, making it a leader in Amazon's hardware product line. In May 2011, Kindle e-book sales exceeded paper book sales, including hardcover and paperback books, for the first time, showing how popular it is.

Initially, Kindle was also invincible in the Chinese market. After officially entering the Chinese market in 2013, less than three years later, China has become the world's largest market for Amazon Kindle devices. According to Amazon data, from 2013 to 2018, millions of Kindles were sold in China, and the total number of books in Kindle Chinese e-bookstores reached 700,000, an increase of nearly 10 times from 2013.

However, Amazon's extremely restrained product update speed still failed to keep up with the changes in Chinese people's reading habits. According to the "21st National Reading Survey" released by the China Institute of Press and Publication, nearly 80% of adult citizens will read on their mobile phones in 2023, and only 25.3% of adult citizens will choose e-readers to read, which is 1.5 percentage points less than the previous year. Among these readers who choose to buy e-readers separately, Kindle is not necessarily the first choice.

So far, Kindle has only launched nine generations of products. The latest model, Kindle Scribe, has been on the market for two years. Both the hardware and software are, after all, "tools" for Amazon to operate its digital store and are definitely not high-end products.

For A Xu, a Kindle user who has been using it for more than five years and the developer of EpubKit, a software that converts web pages to e-books, the closed nature of the Kindle system means that its functions are simple and concise.

On the one hand, the system fluency and text reading experience are very good. Each generation of products has improved screen clarity, memory, body thinness, battery life, built-in reading light and other functions directly related to reading. But on the other hand, it is too conservative. The single reading function and eye-protection ink screen have never changed. For example, even with the 10.2-inch screen Kindle Scribe, it can only accept text formats such as epub, and the PDF reading and note-taking functions are still a "mess."

"When I want to read some online novels, I have to download a multi-viewing system to be compatible with many novels that are not in the Amazon bookstore." Another former Kindle user, Ye Ao, admitted that he originally bought Kindle to read some "big books", but later found that he still preferred online novels, and the novel APP or the Android open system launched by Hanwang, Onyx, Xiaomi, Dangdang, etc. are obviously more convenient, cheaper, and have more functions. "You can listen to books and browse Zhihu."

When short videos and fragmented reading have already made the soil of e-reading muddy, the open or semi-open systems of domestic e-books have posed an even greater impact on Kindle.

The open systems of manufacturers such as Aragonite have a certain advantage in the domestic market

After Kindle announced a two-year phase-out plan in 2022, domestic e-readers seized the opportunity and quickly captured the market. After Kindle announced its departure from China, iReader jumped to first place in market share, followed by Hanvon and Onyx, and the three companies occupied most of the market share. In the first four months of this year, Onyx's online sales in China increased by 49.5% year-on-year, while Hanvon's sales increased by 65 times, achieving a curve overtaking...

What Ye Ao has been carrying with him recently is no longer a Kindle, but a BOOX Leaf3 from the domestic manufacturer Onyx, which can run third-party software such as WeChat Reading and Bilibili Comics very smoothly.

However, it cannot be ignored that Kindle was once the "big brother" in the Chinese market, and it still occupied more than 60% of the Chinese e-reader market until 2021. This means that even if Kindle is no longer sold directly in China, the Kindle Chinese e-bookstore stops operating or stops cloud download services, there are still a large number of Kindle users, and the considerable number of aging e-book devices also makes the third-party maintenance business in full swing.

Screen light leakage is very common

Xiaolian from Shanghai is one of the people who is looking for self-service maintenance on the Internet."I have been using a Kindle Oasis that I bought in 2016. I bought the device directly from Amazon for about 2,400 yuan. The only problem I have with it over the years is a small crack on the screen. Although it allows light to pass through, it is still usable."As a graduate student in humanities and social sciences, Xiao Lian usually needs to read a lot of content. A simple ink screen reader can meet her daily reading needs, but the fragile screen makes her very distressed."The official warranty period is only one year. My device must have exceeded the period, and Amazon's entire Kindle service has been shut down. It is really troublesome to find an official screen replacement."

As we all know, the screen is the most fragile part of the Kindle device. It can be damaged by squeezing, falling, or exposure to the sun. In the Kindle community, there are many ways for screens to "die", including being accidentally squeezed on the sofa, being hit by hard objects in a bag, or being broken by a slight slip off the bed.

On the second-hand trading platform Xianyu, the prices of second-hand Kindles have indeed experienced a large-scale "dive" after Kindle officially withdrew from China in June this year. The seventh-generation and earlier Kindles currently generally cost no more than 300 yuan, and the prices of second-hand devices belonging to the eighth and ninth generations, namely the Kindle Oasis series, have also dropped from 2,000 yuan to around 800 yuan.

Buying a second-hand replacement seems to be the most cost-effective option, but on the other hand, the Kindle repair business is booming. The Kindle repair business on e-commerce platforms, especially the screen replacement business, is booming.

Kindle screen replacement services are divided into different categories according to models, and the prices vary

The reporter noticed from the search results on the e-commerce platform that merchants who provide screen replacement services also charge according to the model, ranging from 100 to 1,200 yuan. Xiaolian's Kindle Oasis 1 with slight light leakage only costs 260 yuan to replace the screen, which is much cheaper than second-hand devices.

"Although it is not as smooth and sensitive as the original screen, the handwriting function can be used normally and there is no data loss." After weighing the pros and cons, a user who spent 1,200 yuan to replace the screen of his Australian Kindle Scribe commented that although the replacement screen experience is not as good as the original one, the price is half cheaper than buying it from an agent, and it also saves the trouble of data transfer, "I am quite satisfied." We noticed that on the e-commerce platform, some stores specializing in Kindle screen replacement business have a monthly sales volume of more than 7,000.

As to why people choose to replace the screen rather than buy a second-hand Kindle or other reader, Amin, the operator of the Kindle social service website "Book Companion", may have expressed the thoughts of most users.

Screen replacement is actually widely used in Guangdong, Shenzhen and other places.

He believes that as a terminal product, Kindle can be used as a reader. The closure of the e-store and cloud download functions only affects the normal use of Amazon's network services by Chinese users, that is, the entire reading ecosystem such as the synchronization of local e-books and Send to Kindle (uploading files to the Kindle library) services. "But as long as content can be downloaded, Kindle is useful. A big part of the reason for not wanting to change devices is because data storage and transmission are somewhat troublesome."

Currently, Kindle users generally use two methods to solve the content download problem. One is to change the region and move the account to another country or region; the other is to use other methods to transfer files, such as USB hardware device transfer or transfer through the original registered email address. However, the region change may cause the backup data content of the Chinese account to be lost, and no matter which region is set, Amazon's advantage in Chinese books is no longer there, which has also spawned another third-party service "find e-books on behalf of others". No matter what, old users who have feelings for Kindle will still choose to "patch it up for another year."

Traditional liquid crystal displays (LCD) are not suitable for long-term reading, which prompted the invention of electronic ink screens (e-Paper). Currently, more than 90% of the electronic papers on the market come from the same company, namely E-ink Technology Co., Ltd. in Taiwan, China. Whether it is Hanwang's latest AI electronic paper learning notebook or the latest Kindle Scribe, they all use E-Ink Carta series electronic paper. In terms of the screen alone, Kindle is not so "closed and backward".

The electronic ink screen is made up of a grid of millions of capsules, each of which contains several sub-capsules, each of which contains a small drop of black or white pigment. There is a liquid in the main capsule that allows the sub-capsules to float freely: the black pigment has a negative charge, and the white pigment has a positive charge. When a wire at the top of the main capsule is positively charged, it attracts the black pigment sub-capsules, causing them to float to the top, and repels the white sub-capsules, causing them to sink to the bottom. The arrangement of black and white dots on a white background forms characters and graphics for people to read.

The principle of E-ink ink screen

The capsules are held in place in a rigid array by a thin, transparent plastic panel, which, when thin enough, can be used in conjunction with touch sensors on certain devices to allow the screen to be controlled with a finger — but is also the cause of the screen's fragility.

In addition, the technical principle of the mainstream color e-ink screen on the market is actually to add a layer of RGB filter on the basis of the black and white screen. The screen brightness will be a little darker than the conventional black and white ink screen, and it is not a very high-end product. Technically speaking, the functions of all e-ink screens cannot be compared with LCD screens, but e-ink screens often account for 40% or even 70% of the cost of the entire reading device. Of course, if there is no reading demand, no matter how good the e-ink screen is, it will become a lid for instant noodles.