Amazon to pull the plug on Kindle in China amid growing coemption, harsh data privacy rules

Amazon will be shutting down its Kindle e-book store in China by June 2023, the company announced, putting an end to its nine-year venture in the market. It has already asked its retail suppliers to stop selling the device.

The Kindle China e-bookstore will stop selling e-books from June 30 next year, Amazon announced on its Weibo account on Thursday.

This means that customers in China will not be able to buy new e-books after that day and won’t be able to download books they have purchased after that year. It said that it will offer refunds for Chinese customers who bought a Kindle this year.

It will also remove the Kindle app from Chinese app stores in 2024, it added.

Even though Amazon did not give a reason for its retreat from the Chinese e-book market, it’s definitely not the first US tech giant to pull out of the market in recent days.

Other US firms like Airbnb, Yahoo and Microsoft's LinkedIn scaled back their operations last year and replaced it with a jobs board with no social networking functions.

The announcements come in the wake of China’s strict data privacy law specifying how companies collect and store data takes effect. Apart from that, China’s harsh internet rules and growing domestic competition have posed difficulties for these firms.

However, Amazon said that its other businesses such as logistics, ads and devices, will continue.

“Amazon’s long-term development commitment in China will not change,” Amazon said in the Weibo post. “We have established an extensive business base in China and will continue to innovate and invest.”

Last December, a Reuters investigation detailed Amazon’s efforts to win favour in China, including that it collaborated with the country’s propaganda arm to launch a “China Books” portal, partly in an effort to expand its Kindle business in China.

(With inputs from agencies)

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