Amazon To Shut China Kindle Store After Years-Long Struggle

Amazon will shut its Chinese ebook store next year, pulling a small but prominent business from a market where it's failed to make major inroads against local rivals. From a report: The e-commerce giant will discontinue the Kindle eBook store on June 30, 2023, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. It promised to continue supporting Kindle readers or refund any device purchases made after January this year.

The bookstore experience.

[Ostracus]

I can see why. China just seems to have more of [thecoolhunter.net], and better bookstores [thecoolhunter.net] than the US.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

In China, you don't go to the bookstore for books, you go there to show how cool you are, preferably with selfies. That's why the bookstores in China make sure they look as cool as possible. And make sure their shelves are stocked with the thoughts of Chairman Xi, to ensure the Party is happy.

Re:

[Hasaf]

I have been to a lot of bookstores in P.R. China. They did not look like the book stores in those pictures. They were decent, a bit below what you would expect at a Barnes and Noble in the US, and never any reading chairs. Primarily this was in Xinyang and Zhengzhou, Henan province and Taizhou, Jiangsu province. I went to many others, those were just the ones I went to frequently. The one at the end of "the walking street" in Xinyang was probably the one I went to the most.

China has also frozen out movies

[rsilvergun]

Not from censorship, the movie studios were happy the censor for the Chinese audience, but by demanding a large amount of the profits to the point where it's not all that valuable a market for American and other foreign movie producers. This is on purpose because China's government doesn't want their own local film studios competing with the American ones. Which makes sense when you think about it. I mean they're not worried about American films causing social unrest since the films are already censored but they don't want all those dollars going out of the country into America.

For my money I'm hoping that we stop getting these really crummy films with terrible dialogues and designed to be dubbed into Chinese and easy to censor.

Hard to fight piracy

[Crashmarik]

Just about any book available in Mandarin, is available from dozens of pirate sites.
All you need to do is to look for it and it's there.