The Kindle is in trouble before the dawn of E-books

Amazon's Kindle has been seen as the last straw to crush traditional media and publishers, and its impact on electronic reading is no less than the ipod's transformation of the music media. Low hardware prices, excellent endurance and an electronic ink screen close to the print book make the Kindle the best choice for electronic reading, and it is not polite to say that the Kindle is the absolute king on the way to digital reading.

But that doesn't mean Amazon can rest easy. After years of rapid growth, sales of us e-books rose sharply in 2013, just 3.8%, while hardcover books achieved nearly 10% per cent growth. Electronic reading seems to have not yet grown, has encountered bottlenecks. It's enough to make Amazon feel a little bit behind the chill.

In response, the Kindle recently launched 132 e-book typesetting styles, hoping to further improve the reading experience of E-books, to attract more users from traditional paper books to the electronic reading, and thus continue to promote the growth of the e-book market.

Why do electronic reading devices, represented by the Kindle, now face the dilemma of readers returning to traditional paper-based reading?

The answer is that electronic reading does not fundamentally alter the way and experience of reading.

This can be seen from the direction of Amazon's flagship. Kindle readers have always stressed that the reading experience of unlimited access to traditional reading, especially the electronic ink screen, directly to the reader's perception and the endurance of the device to the height of the beyond, the user holding the Kindle as if holding a real paper book generally. This fitting ensures that the user does not spend a lot of time and energy to adapt to the process of electronic reading.

But a good screen is just the foundation, and the content on the screen is the core focus of the reader. In this respect, Amazon's resources have no rivals, but in the content of the display is not the dominant, the ipad as the representative of the LCD screen due to color, resolution, application Mall and other aspects of the absolute advantage, making it in the layout, design, interaction and so far ahead of the Kindle. And the large publishing house for the neglect of e-books and even deliberately weakened, but also to a large number of electronic books reading experience is very poor, the reader spent money, but did not get the level of reading enjoyment, which for the public users, especially heavy users, is unacceptable.

And more importantly, the biggest advantage of electronic reading over traditional reading is that it is portable and stored, and readers can read what they want without having to carry heavy books. However, this advantage is not the overwhelming competitiveness of electronic readers such as the Kindle, because the use of reading scenes in modern life has been greatly compressed, whether in the home environment or the workplace, users of the need for portability is not strong, and commuting and other mobile devices such as mobile equipment occupy, The advantages of portability are greatly weakened; and the large content of the book, but also decided to read a book for a long time, so the reader's continuous reading content to switch the chance also did not imagine the high, different books often rely on different environments, which also make the storage of electronic reading advantages difficult to display.

In addition, the popularity of smartphones and tablets has further squeezed the market for a single feature of the Kindle, which allows users to read the same content on their phones, with the advantage of the Kindle's portability and storage, and its exquisite typography Spending hundreds of more to buy another product is an increase in the economy and the burden of carrying.

As a result, the Kindle, after years of development, has been successful in promoting the concept of electronic reading, but it has not brought about a fundamental change in mobile reading. The Kindle's reading experience is still not out of the way, or even deliberately close to the traditional reading, such a product will only be a transitional equipment.

So what kind of experience will future mobile reading be?

The answer lies in interaction.

The traditional paper reading, the reader needs is a line of reading, thinking, marking, especially for those non-drama books, ordinary users of the reading process will inevitably be some boring, and this is just one of the biggest bottlenecks in traditional reading. The Kindle-represented E-reader still failed to solve the problem, so it was difficult for users who did not love to read, to develop the habit of reading because of the Kindle's existence, while many of the heavily read users were diverted back to traditional reading for the many drawbacks of the Kindle's reading.

Therefore, the future of mobile reading, the biggest problem to be solved is to use the advantages of mobile devices to attract more users to develop the habit of reading.

The biggest advantage of mobile devices is the way they interact. I believe many readers have watched the thought of Rom, this way of saying the word to attract a large number of users to read and understand the book recommended in the program, for the general public, reading a book is difficult, but listening to the one-hour storytelling is very easy, if you can listen to the way without pressure to complete the "reading" of a book, The cost of reading will be greatly reduced, which is why the Shuwang class is used in a big way. And for mobile reading, if you can use a new way of interacting, for example, dynamic charts, real-time scene simulation, automatic reading and so on, so that the books get rid of the dry layout of both text and pictures, the whole book is like a slide or even a film, so that users can be attracted by the content and display when reading, thoroughly immersed in reading , compared to the traditional reading, interactive reading so that readers never know the next page of the wonderful, which will greatly stimulate the user's desire to read.

The Kindle is a good product, his good, it is the high fidelity reduction of paper reading, allowing users to experience the undifferentiated mobile reading on electronic devices, but this trait, however, blurs the boundaries between electronic and paper-based reading and limits their future development, leading to the current Kindle bottleneck. As a transitional product, the Kindle's mission has been basically completed, the future of mobile reading, will be in the wider field and higher level, relying on their own interactive mode, so that more users to develop the habit of reading, if Amazon can successfully do this, it is really good.