Amazon Kindle is gaining immense popularity in China these days even though Kindle and Kindle 2 are not officially shipped there. While buying a Kindle online on Amazon Store, if you enter the location as ‘China’, it shows a regret message – ‘Unfortunately, we are unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle content in China’.
However, Chinese are known to be avid technology lovers and true gadget freaks. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Kindle is selling in large volumes in Chinese Gray Markets, stalls in Beijing electronics bazaar and other Chinese websites including Taobao.com, an auction site similar to eBay. PC World reports that Kindle 2 was on sale for 2,600 yuan (US$380) and the Kindle DX for 4,300 yuan ($630) at the Beijing bazaar. In fact, many people in China get the Kindle through their friends and family in United States by ordering the Kindle online, having it delivered to an address in United States and then having it mailed to them in China. e-Readers are quite popular in China these days and it is expected that sales of e-readers could reach 3.5 million units in China this year, up several fold from around 400,000 last year. Though there are numerous Chinese e-Readers in the market, Amazon Kindle stands its ground against one and all. Learn how to open MSG file.
It is not hard to imagine that as and when Amazon Kindle starts shipping in China, it is bound to be a monumental success.
I brought my Kindle 2 to China, and it remains the only e-reader I have seen in my 2 months here so far. I know there’s a Kindle knockoff available, and I saw an ad for it as I stepped off the plane.
I get plenty of curious eyes whenever I’m reading in public!
I live in Shanghai and I bought my Kindle 2 through a friend in the US. It’s great experience reading the bible (Chinese union version) on the shuttle bus to work every morning, thanks to the unicode fonts hacking from blogkindle. It’s pretty handy to convert text or html to prc format ebooks using mobipocket creator and read them on the Kindle device.
Are there any customs fees or duties when buying Kindle from Amazon and shipping it to China using a mail forwarding service?