Amazon China: the best source of Chinese ebooks ever?

Chinese ebooks always seemed to me to be an excellent way to get more Chinese reading practice. They’re cheap, abundant, easy to access, etc. However, I’ve never been very pleased with the sources of Chinese ebooks that I’ve found.

I tried Amazon UK, but the selection of Chinese ebooks there has always been extremely limited (maybe that will change in future). The stupid thing was, I have and use an Amazon.cn account, and I knew that Amazon China had finally got around to offering Kindle devices and ebooks, but it just didn’t occur to me to switch my Kindle account (I don’t actually have a Kindle, I just read the books on Android) to Amazon.cn.

I read a lot of English ebooks from Amazon UK, so I guess I just didn’t want to give those up, but really I just hadn’t thought about it properly. Anyway, I then saw Sara Jaaksola’s post about reading Chinese ebooks with Kindle and realised what I’d been missing. I just changed the email address on my Amazon.cn account so it was different to my UK one, then logged in with that on my Kindle device.

That’s the drawback to this: you’ve got to choose one country for your Amazon account and stick with it on your Kindle device.

Get Chinese ebooks with an Amazon China account

If you’ve already got your Kindle signed into an Amazon account from a country other than China (.cn), I’m afraid you’ll have to make the decision about which country’s ebooks you want the most on your device (I guess you could buy two Kindle devices, one for each country, if you have the money to spare).

The other thing is to make sure that your Amazon China account email address is different to the one you’re currently using. Then you can just log-in on your Kindle device with that email and download Chinese ebooks galore.

As you might expect, there’s a huge selection of Chinese ebooks on Amazon China, and they’re incredibly cheap. Like, 2-3元 a go cheap, with a few more expensive ones. A lot of them are free as well. The other great thing is that you can most likely use your normal debit / credit card to pay for stuff on Amazon.cn - you don’t need a Chinese bank account as they accept VISA, MasterCard, American Express etc.

Remember that you don’t need a Kindle device to read these books - you can download them to software for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS etc. as well.

So what are you waiting for? Get downloading those cheap Chinese ebooks at Amazon.cn!