After numerous rumors and delays, Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest e-commerce company, had started selling its e-book readers in China since June 7. In the meantime, many domestic competitors including Dangdang, Hanvon, Tianyi quickly rolled out their e-book readers to grab the market share.

What impact will Kindle have on China's e-publishing industry? "Kindle e-readers and tablets would boost online retailers to develop digital books and invest more money and technology in e-books market in the future," a Jingdong principal told CIP News reporter recently.

However, in An Da's opinion, the chief of audiovisual electronic publishing department of Posts and Telecom Press, Amazon might face several obstacles, including regulatory challenges for limited content in e-books and Kindle's high prices. Amazon should step up cooperation with content providers to enrich e-book store in order to gain more market shares.

Promoting healthy competition

After a long time of delays，Amazon launched a Chinese Kindle app store in December of last year which meant it had leapt the final hurdle as it seeked to sell its hardware in the country. On June 7, the front-lit Kindle Paperwhite e-reader was priced locally at 849 yuan.

As Kindle officially gets into China on June 7, the domestic market silence was suddenly broken. On the coming day, Dangdang released its pre-order of "watching the second generation" for e-readers which priced at 699 yuan. In the same June, both Hanvon and Tianyi launched its e-books officially which priced at 849 yuan. Kindle triggered price war in China's e-publishing market.

"The Kindle's arrival will promote the development of e-book market in China. However, e-book reader has become a high standardized and homogenized product with no technical barrier in hardware, and this will be a big challenge for some brands lacking of content and e-reading experience," said Yu Meng, a marketing manager of Dangdang. "Kindle's arrival is definitely a good thing for China's e-reading market. With its joining, the domestic digital publishing market will gain a positive stimulus for healthy development," the Hanvon principal You Wenjing told the journalist recently.

Content is key to competition

The introduction of Kindle raised lots of industry concerns and spurred domestic retailers' competitions. "Kindle's content providers in China are weaker than its matured business model, good user experience and reputation," An pointed out. Compared with Dangdang, Jingdong and Tianyi which offer content more than hundreds of thousands of digitizing books, Kindle store only contains about 40,000 digitizing books.

China's largest online bookseller Dangdang is simply attempting to create a foothold in content sector. Now Dangdang has 200,000 digitizing books. "We will consider content providers and user experience as the core competence in the future," Yu Meng stressed, "it could be tough for Amazon to face severe competition with limited content."

China Telecom Tianyi relies on the appeal of its digital book museum to attract and keep customers which owns a total of 300,000 digitizing books and has made cooperation with more than 300 publishing houses. As of now, Tianyi has 120 million users and is currently being downloaded 120,000 times a day. There is a large book network resource for readers to download. In contrast, although Amazon is a trusted name in the west, it has lower popularity in the e-publishing business in China.

Amazon should boost revenues for developers as soon as possible in order to attract more cooperation with content providers. In addition, Amazon ought to help publishing companies get publishing rights and improve conversion for seamless synchronous read to store more content.

Sun Peilin, a senior analyst at the consultancy, said he believed the biggest obstacle Kindle faced was Kindle now could not provide enough contents for consumers to purchase or download. Amazon should cooperate with more content providers to draw customers into buying Kindle's e-book products in the fierce competition.

(China IP News)