Archive for the ‘chinese ereaders’ tag
eReaders in China Impacted by Tablets no comments
The Chinese ereader market is the second largest on this planet after the US. Until the Chinese government stepped in recently and began regulating the industry and limiting new players it seemed that a new Chinese ereader was being announced every few days.
According to an online article yesterday in the Global Times, the Chinese ereader market has been seriously impacted by tablet PCs, of which new models are flooding the market there just as ereaders were before the government stepped in.
In the third quarter of 2010, sales of ereaders in China amounted to 261,900 units, which was up slightly over the previous two quarters. Unit sales for the full year are now expected to reach 1 million units, down dramatically from the 3.5 million units forecast previously by technology research firm Analysys International.
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eReading is Really Big in China 3 comments
Judging by the ever-growing number of ereaders continuously being released in China, it should come as no surprise that ereading is probably more popular there than anywhere else on the planet.
The Independent reports that in 2009 the value of digital publishing surpassed that of traditional publishing in China – this according to China’s General Administration of Press and Publication.
Most of the ereading in China seems to be done on mobile phones. According to Research and Markets almost a half million dedicated ereaders have been sold there in the first half of 2010 – up from just over a quarter million in all of last year.
Will the iPad be going to China any time soon? No official word from Apple, but the iPad has just received a safety certification from the Chinese government – a necessary first step before the iPad can be released there.
And what of the Kindle? The Kindle 3 will support the Chinese language (both Simple and Traditional) along with several other new languages. There have been recent rumors that Amazon might be planning to launch the Kindle ereader in China in the near future – rumors fueled in part by a job opening posted briefly on Amazon.cn for a “Sr. Product Manager, Amazon Kindle.”
Sony announced in May that it would be releasing its ereader in China this year as well. There are an estimated 200 to 300 million book readers in China, so it could prove to be the most lucrative market for ereaders, especially as Chinese readers seem to be wholeheartedly embracing digital reading. On the other hand, rampant piracy may make it a much more challenging market for selling ebooks than the West.
I’m wondering if the Kindle Store here in the US will start carrying ebooks in the newly supported languages once the Kindle 3 is shipping? There seem to be very few Chinese or Korean Kindle books at the moment. There are more books in Japanese, but most of these seem to be Japanese public domain classics (did you know that Genji Monogatari, written in the eleventh century, is usually considered to be the world’s first novel?). There also do not yet seem to be many books that would use the Cyrillic character set offered by the Kindle 3.
Currently, the only non-English content that you can easily search
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Is the iPad Really a Killer? no comments
Well, now that the iPad has killed the Kindle and other dedicated ereaders … wait a minute there, better hold the presses – reports of the Kindle’s death are apparently greatly exaggerated. Amazon said today that not only is the Kindle still its #1 bestselling item; it has seen ever increasing sales in the second quarter of this year – this while the iPad was selling about a million units a month. Amazon says that during this period the Kindle ereader saw increased sales both sequentially month-over-month and on a year-over-year basis.
"We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189," said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."
In addition to the lower price of the Kindle, I’m sure that having the Kindle for sale at Target stores has helped.
The Kindle Store now also has more than 630,000 books, which includes 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers. Over the last three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books.
This is not to say that the iPad has not had a profound effect on the ereader market. If not for the launch of Apple’s “magical” device, we would probably have a much more crowded market. The wave of announced ereaders just fizzled out after it became apparent that the iPad was going to be such a huge success. Price cuts by the major ereader makers further raised the bar to entry into the market by new players.
Pressure from the iPad no doubt played a large part in the sudden and viscous price slashing by Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The prices of ebook readers had to come down as comparison to the iPad lowered the apparent value of stand-alone ereaders for many would-be purchasers. Without the iPad, ereader prices would probably not have come down by as much or as fast.
Without the iPad we would probably be paying less for many of our ebooks, as without Apple it is doubtful if the publishers could have pressured Amazon into agreeing to the agency pricing model.
Rather than killing dedicated monochrome ereaders, it feels to me as though the iPad has forced them into an early cycle of commoditization. I’m afraid that at least until we get some sort of non-backlit color display we are only going to see evolutionary rather than revolutionary improvements to our new ereaders. Exhibit A – Kindle DX Graphite.
Before many devices become mature they are constantly being improved with new and better features by the few manufacturers building them. During this phase consumers are willing to pay for increasingly better products with the new and better features that they have been wanting.
By the time most of the wished for features have been added, more manufacturers will have joined the market, selling their devices for lower prices and competing mainly on the fact that their product has most of the desired features – but nothing new and groundbreaking – at a much lower price. This means little or no new innovation, but lower prices for consumers.
This is one classic way in which markets are disrupted. The new cut-rate manufacturers are working on very low margins and the original builders and innovators of the device are driven out of the market because they can’t make enough money on the product any longer. Amazon and Barnes & Noble prevented this by preemptively slashing their own prices, making it much more difficult for new players to enter the market. They can afford to do this because they make money on the ebooks they sell for their ereaders.
If all of this is true in the case of ereaders in the US, then it means that we probably won’t see a lot of new features until we get reflective color screens. For example, we may not see flexible ereader displays which are much harder to break as soon as we would have otherwise. Take it from someone who has broken an ereader screen – this would be a nice feature.
So, has the iPad actually managed to kill anything?
Last week Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments in the second quarter of 2010 were up 20.7 percent over the same period last year. That was better than expected. Mini-notebooks (netbooks) had been seeing sales increases of more than 70 percent during the previous two quarters. Sales of netbooks increased in the second quarter 2010, but only by a much lower 20 percent.
I imagine a lot of that slower netbook sales growth is directly attributable to the iPad. I have an iPad, netbook and dedicated ereaders. Personally, I find the iPad does a much better job of replacing my netbook than it does at replacing my ereaders. Netbook sales may well have been affected more than that of dedicated ereaders. Portable gaming devices will also likely be hit hard by the iPad.
Big Trouble in China?
When the iPad launched in the US, the wave of new ereaders that had been announced around the first of the year had not yet launched. But in China the ereader market was already very crowded, with new entrants seemingly being announced every few days. With the high rates of piracy in China (there have been estimates that over 90 percent of ebooks being read there are pirated), the manufacturers of ereaders there cannot rely on making money from selling content like Amazon, B&N and other ereader/ebook sellers in this country do.
There are some signs that the iPad and its clones may be leading to a thinning out of the number of ereaders in China. Digitimes today reported that Hanwang Technology is denying rumors that sales of its ereaders have been seriously impacted by the iPad, and that it is warehousing as many as a half million unsold ereaders.
Trading Markets also reports that the prices of ereaders (as well as the stock prices of the companies making them) in China are coming under pressure from the iPad and other tablets, just as they have here.
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IDEO – EB0600S eReader no comments
Here is another ereader from China looking for partnerships. 
The IDEO-EB0600S ereader supports 18 different formats but no DRM support at the moment. You can buy a sample for $160 USD or 500 pieces for $138 each. The specs:
- Display: 6 – inch e-ink; 16 grayscales
- Text formats supported: PDF, CHM, EPUB, TXT, HTM, HTML, RTF, PDB, DJVU, DJV, iW44, iW4, FB2, OBE, PRC, MOBI, TCR, OPF
- Image format support: JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF
- Chinese and English dictionary; English – Chinese translation.
- Zoom in/out
- Wi-Fi & 3G
- Handwriting support
- Music support for MP3 and WMA; 32bps to 384bps
- SD/MS memory card slot; up to 8GB supported
- CPU: Arm9 Core
- RAM: 64MB SDRAM
- Operating system is Linux
- USB 2.0 port
- Battery: 900Mha; said to last two weeks
- 3.5mm Earphone jack
The EB0600S ereader is available in white, black or blue. The overall size is 128 x 178 x 9.9 mm – or 5.4 x 7 x .4 inches. IDEO also appears to be working on another ereader with a TFT LCD screen and Wi-Fi only which should be ready in a few months.
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Gorld 600TW – eReader with Phone no comments
The Beijing Gorld company has announced a new ereader for the Chinese
market. What makes this one a little different is that the Gorld 600TW has the dubious distinction of being the first ereader with a built-in cell phone.
Other than the phone this is pretty standard fare: a 6-inch e-ink screen with 16 grayscales, 6,000 page turns per charge, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, MP3 playback. There also appears to be a voice recording function.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me having a phone built into an ereader – I can just imagine holding this up to my ear in the middle of a business meeting – but I guess someone had to do it. The Gorld 600TW ereader also does text messaging, and I could see this as being possibly useful.
Via Cloned In China
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Large Format eReader Shipments to Increase by 300% in 2010; eReaders Becoming Popular in China no comments
Digitimes is reporting that shipments of 9.7-inch ereaders are expected to increase by 300 – 320% in 2010. Prime View International, which recently purchased e-Ink, may not have enough manufacturing capacity to keep up with the increased demand.
The article goes on to say that shipments of ereaders are expected to reach 3.5-4 million units globally in 2009.
The Kindle DX is the primary larger format ereader at the moment with its 9.7-inch screen, but the DX will be joined shortly by the Plastic Logic Que and no doubt others will be making their debuts soon.
Ereaders are apparently becoming popular in China as well, with a number of new models being introduced recently. According to C114.net about 5 million Chinese read ebooks on mobile devices. So far these have been smaller format devices, but Hanwang plans to launch a 9” ereader soon.
Hanwang is the current market leader, but new Chinese ereaders are being announced frequently. The Founder Group, a Chinese IT company, introduced an ereader that very closely copies the Kindle’s physical design. BenQ has also released a new ereader that should ship to the Chinese market in January 2010.
We probably won’t be seeing many of the ereaders meant for the Chinese market in the West anytime soon.
The C114.net article referenced above also notes that it is estimated that 95 per cent of the Chinese who read electronically download pirated ebooks. Perhaps this is one reason that China is not on the Kindle Global list.
