Why Amazon will fail in China

Apple iPad (Photo credits: Best Buy)

One of the presents we brought for one of our friends in Shanghai was a Kindle Fire, the latest hardware tools from Amazon. Before we decided to actually hand over the present, we decided to see of we could get the machine running. It failed.

The Kindle Fire can surf online, so you can use the internet, send emails and so on, so a huge improvement compared to the original ebook reader. Getting the Kindle Fire online was not that easy, but the core business proved to be much hard: downloading books.

We tried the Chinese website of Amazon and after two days of trying we had to give up: in China you cannot download Chinese books. And since the browsing experience of the Kindle fire is pretty poor, we decided to leave one of our older iPads here: at least we know that is working.

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