Amazon’s Kindle leaps Chinese Great Firewall

Although Amazon’s new 3G Kindle reader is not officially for sale in Mainland China, the e-reader is now being snapped up on auction sites and grey markets in China as more and more users have found that Kindle’s browser could leap the state internet firewall.

Customers of Mainland China could not get access to websites like Facebook and Twitter due to central censorship for a long time and Kindle has changed this situation for them. With its own Internet browsing function through Wi-Fi net, this e-reader automatically leaps the “Great Firewall” of the country.

China tops the world’s Internet community with a total web user number of 420 million. Amazon said it is not likely to ship or sell the Kindle to Mainland China earlier this year. Yet Chinese consumers figured out alternatives by themselves: highly developed auction sites like Taobao and EBay provide large amount of smuggled Kindles with prices ranging from RMB700 to RMB5000 (£70-500).

A seller in Beijing told the paper South China Morning Post that he has slipped a few Kindles into China after having them delivered to an address outside the mainland. He has sold 300 in the past month already. Passengers who travel from Hong Kong to Mainland China could bring the Kindles in as well.

Popular bloggers in China are recommending the device widely recently because of the fact that the Kindle could scale the wall automatically. “I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there,” the paper quoted a mainland blogger as saying. “And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.”

The 3G Kindle uses global system mobile (GSM) communication technology, which gives coverage in more than 100 countries, including China.

Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan of the University of Hong Kong’s electrical and electronic engineering department, said that mainland Internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget: “Kindle has a book-buying focus, so the censors may think these connections are relatively safe.”

Rival warned that Amazon’s Kindle would fail in China due to copycats. As the chief executive of Shanda Literature Ltd in Beijing has expressed his concern that Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle is unlikely to grab a significant market share in China in an interview with a newspaper last month.