June 29 marked the fifth anniversary of the Kindle E-reader's entrance into the Chinese market. On the same date, Amazon China published the "Amazon Charts Most Sold" list of Chinese eBooks from 2013 to 2018, analyzing digital reading trends in China.
According to the data, several million Kindle E-readers have now been sold across China, becoming the world's biggest Kindle market since 2016. So far, the number of books in the Chinese Kindle eBook store has reached almost 700,000, ten times the number in 2013.
Moreover, Kindle readers' willingness to pay for books has significantly increased. In the past year, the purchase of Kindle eBooks has increased tenfold, while the number of Prime memberships has increased twelve times over the same period.
The Amazon Charts indicate that The Three Body Problems, a Sci-Fi series by Liu Cixin, tops the charts as the most purchased eBook over the past five years. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin is the most downloaded of all free Chinese Kindle eBooks, and a Japanese novel Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino received the most comments from readers.
Comparing Amazon Charts for paperback books and Kindle eBooks from recent years, it's obvious that these two markets have a relationship of mutual promotion, with the pattern becoming more and more significant.
Kindle statistics show that when compared with paperbacks, eBooks are snapped up much faster in light of social issues and public attention. For example, sales of the eBook In the Name of People increased by 191 times after a TV show of the same name aired in 2017. In comparison, the sale of the paperback edition only increased by 21 times.
Kindle eBooks also opened up the market for classics as well as original English literature, as these two genres, with titles such as One Hundred Years of Solitude or Harry Potter, both had an impressive ranking and a huge number of readers.
To fulfill varying demands and requirements of Chinese readers, Amazon Kindle China has used innovative techniques for better localization, such as the Word Wise function, which requires the user to simply touch a word they want to look up, showing its pronunciation, meaning, example sentences and so on.
More examples include Kindle Unlimited (KU), a monthly subscription service, Kindle's involvement with Weibo, the Send-to-Kindle function, the allowance for WeChat payment and so on. These adaptions to the Chinese market helped popularize Kindle E-reader products, alongside "digital reading" as a new way of perceiving literature that will continue to thrive in this era of new media.
