Amazon stops selling Kindle e-readers in China

Amazon’s Kindle book reader booth at the Shanghai Book Fair in August 2020 – Photo: CNN

According to CNN, in the announcement broadcast on June 2 about this decision, Amazon said that from July 2023, Kindle users in China will not be able to buy Amazon’s books online. Thus, another Western technology giant has withdrawn from the world’s second largest economy.

For existing customers, they will still be able to download pre-purchased titles to their Kindle readers through June 2024. According to Amazon, it will stop providing Kindle e-readers to retailers in China from June 2.

Amazon first entered the Chinese market in 2004 after acquiring Joyo.com, an online retail platform for books, music and videos. In 2019, Amazon stopped buying and selling in the Chinese market, meaning that customers there could not buy goods from domestic sellers even though they could still buy foreign goods.

“Amazon China’s long-term commitments to customers will remain unchanged,” Amazon said in a statement. “We have established a large-scale business platform in China and will continue to innovate and invest,” the statement continued.

In recent years, many foreign technology companies have withdrawn from China. Last week, Airbnb announced that it would withdraw its listing from China’s stock markets and focus only on people traveling abroad.

Previously, in October 2021, LinkedIn (Microsoft’s online recruitment platform) said it would stop the version of this platform in China because of the “challenging operating environment”.

After withdrawing LinkedIn from China, Microsoft launched a new platform, InJobs. However, the way InJobs works seems to be more like a regular job portal, not in the direction of a personalization platform for candidates and recruiters like LinkedIn.