Chinese New Year 2024 starts on February 10th, 2024, and celebrations culminate with the Lantern Festival on February 24th, 2024. This is a 16 day event, and most of the e-reader and digital paper industry are on pause. Most of the e-readers that you use on a daily basis are made in China, in addition to shipping and fulfillment of orders. Many popular Kindle models are not shipping until late February, and this same issue can be felt across all brands. Almost all companies are affected by the lack of of manufacturing, customer service, fulfillment and logistics.
Good e-reader sells e-readers directly to customers and businesses on a daily basis, and we rely on our partners such as Onyx Boox, Bigme, Pocketbook, Meebook, Xiaomi, Moaan, Hisense and many others to ship products out, so customers can get their hands on a shiny new device. With the Year of the Dragon upon us, none of our partners are fulfilling orders or shipping us out hundreds of units a week. We encourage customers to know that there will be shipping delays for most of February.
We are not the only ones affected by this. Barnes and Noble is too. The Nook Glowlight 4 Plus is totally out of stock and nobody is going to be manufacturing them until early April, which is why B&N says in May, they will have more. After e-readers are produced, shipping takes awhile, and then these products need to be sent to a series of centralized warehouses. This entire process takes time, this is also why the brand new Nook Tablet 9 is also coming out in early May. Kobo has plans for two new e-readers, but again, we won’t see them released until May. Onyx Boox who sells e-readers directly on their website is also going to have delayed shipping, because nobody is in the office to send out orders, however their European staff and North American staff are. Pocketbook does not sell e-readers directly, instead they rely on distributors, but overall supplies internationally are limited. Even Amazon, the largest e-reader company has delays on most Kindle products in multiple countries. In Canada, the Paperwhite Signature Edition says it will take 3 weeks to even ship out. The latest generation Kindle Scribe won’t ship out for four weeks. The same is affecting customers in other countries, either with the same products or different ones.
Amazon contracts out the manicuring of their Kindle e-readers to Foxconn. Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Tolino, Mobiscribe and a bunch of other products are manufactured by Netronix in Taiwan. Many other brands and devices are made by various factories in China. E INK, the supplier of e-paper screen technology also has all of their factories closed for the next 3-4 weeks, so nobody is even making the screens that power all of the e-readers and e-notes.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
