Updated June, 2019
Reading lots of of authentic content is a vital step on your way to fluency in Chinese. Luckily for us, it’s now possible to buy foreign language titles from the Kindle Store, including Chinese, making language acquisition much more convenient than ever before. In today’s post we will give you a short overview of how to go about downloading electronic books (ebooks) in Chinese language from your the Kindle Store.
What do I need?
All you need is a Kindle (any model since 2010) or another device that supports the Kindle Store such as an iPad, smartphone or an Android tablet. That together with an Amazon account is all that’s required.
How can I download Kindle books in Chinese?
Getting Chinese ebooks actually works in the same way as downloading Kindle books in English. You don’t need to live in China or Taiwan. Just access the Kindle store and find something you like! You can browse Chinese e-book titles here:
Click here to browse Chinese Kindle Books on Amazon.
Great Selection in 2019
When this article was originally written in 2015, there were only a little over 1,000 Chinese titles to choose from in the Kindle store. Currently (June 2019), there are more than 50,000 titles you can buy for your kindle. That is a massive increase of Chinese books available on Kindle. Another win for Chinese language learners!
Simplified or traditional?
Most of the books we looked at on the Kindle store were in simplified Chinese, with traditional Chinese occasionally available too. Frustratingly, Amazon don’t currently have an official way of distinguishing between the two typesets so you have to check the book description to be sure.
What genres are available?
You can find Chinese ebooks for a number of different genres, including fiction staples such as horror and romance, as well as self-development and business. There is even a selection of comics available in Chinese. As a caveat, I’m not a big manga fan so we have no idea if the comics are good or not. 🙂
With each passing year, technology is transforming the nature of language learning as we know it. We certainly live in exciting times. So what are you waiting for? Check out the Chinese section of the Kindle Store now!
Looking for more audio material in Chinese? Read our review of Chinese Class 101.
Do you have any ebook recommendations? Feel free to write them in the comments below!
Rohan has spent years studying Japanese, Chinese and Korean, and currently lives in Japan. He created the perapera pop-up dictionary plugins to help other learners of Chinese and Japanese.
我就是随便看看
Hi,
Awesome post and even more awesome add-on!! I love pera-pera. Thank you!!
Since you’ve managed to download content from Amazon.cn I would like to ask you how did you manage to register your Kindle with an Amazon.cn account, because I can’t.
I have two different Amazon accounts, one for Spain and one for China with different emails.
I own a Kindle 4th generation which has been deregistered from my Amazon.es account.
However, when I try to register the Kindle in the Chinese account it tells me the account does not exist.
Any hints would greatly be appreciated 🙂
Hi there Croquet. Thanks for your kind words.
For your information, we just released a new Chinese add-on update. 🙂
As for Amazon, the point of our post was that you can download many ebooks from the store of your home country (Spain in your case?). This depends on whether the publisher has chosen to release the content for the Kindle Store worldwide or just in the original country. So there shouldn’t be a need to register with Amazon.cn unless you prefer doing that. I currently download all of my ebooks from either Amazon.co.jp or Amazon.co.uk (I have two Kindles).
Hope this helps.
Francis