Kobo Inc.

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"Writing Life" redirects here. For the literary genre, see life writing.
Rakuten Kobo Inc.
Subsidiary
Industry bookselling, consumer electronics
Founded Toronto, Ontario, Canada (December 2009 (2009-12))[1]
Founder Michael Serbinis
Headquarters Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Area served
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Key people
 Takahito Aiki (CEO)
Michael Tamblyn (president)
Products e-books, e-readers, tablet computers, reading applications
Number of employees
 >400 (April 2014)[2]
Parent Rakuten
Website store.kobobooks.com

Rakuten Kobo Inc. is a Canadian company which sells e-books, e-readers, and tablet computers. It is headquartered in Toronto and is a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce conglomerate Rakuten. The name Kobo is an anagram of book.[3][4]

It originated as Shortcovers, a cloud e-reading service launched by the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books and Music in February 2009.[5] In December 2009, Indigo renamed the service Kobo and spun it off into an independent company. Indigo remained the majority owner, with investors including Borders Group, Cheung Kong Holdings, and REDgroup Retail taking minority stakes.[3] As of March 2010, Indigo Books & Music owned 58% of Kobo Inc.[6] Rakuten acquired the company from these owners in January 2012.[7][8][9]

Products

E-readers

Kobo produces several e-readers with e-paper screens. On the cheaper end, its lineup consists of the base model Kobo Touch, the smaller Kobo Mini, and the Kobo Glo, which has an illuminated screen. On the higher end, it includes the Kobo Aura; the Kobo Aura HD, which adds a higher resolution screen; and the waterproof Kobo Aura H2O. These e-readers compete with the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook product lines.

Kobo's e-readers use Wi-Fi to sync a user's book collection and bookmarks with Kobo's cloud service, which can also be accessed from Kobo e-reading apps for Windows and OS X computers and Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone smartphones.

Tablets

Kobo also produces the Kobo Arc family of Android tablets, which it introduced in 2012 and refreshed in 2013. It previously sold the Kobo Vox, a 7-inch Android tablet released in 2011.

Applications

Kobo offers free reading applications for Windows and OS X computers and Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone smartphones. In June 2015, Kobo received a Top Developer badge in the Google Play store.[10]

Store and publishing

Kobo's bookstore was opened in 2010. It is currently localized for 16 countries and comprises 4 million titles.[11] Content sold on the Kobo Bookstore include eBooks, newspapers, and magazines. The majority of titles are sold in the open ePub format, albeit with DRM.[citation needed]

Several digital book stores have closed down and transferred their users to Kobo's bookstore. This includes the defunct Borders eBook Store,[12] as well as the Sony Reader Store.[13] Both have provided tools for users to migrate purchases and information to Kobo's offering.

On 17 July 2012, Kobo launched a self-publishing platform called Kobo Writing Life.[11][14] Key features of Kobo Writing Life include "deep analytics", allowing authors to track sales in real time; a "learning center" to guide newcomers in digital publishing; and allowing an author to sell books globally. By July 2014, 250,000 books written by 30,000 authors have been published through this program; these authors originate from 157 countries and have books published in 69 languages.[15]

Sales and market share

Kobo sells its devices online and through physical retail channels. The company has strategic partnerships with Cheung Kong Holdings,[16] W H Smith,[17][18] Whitcoulls,[19] FNAC,[20] and Livraria Cultura.[21] Kobo also has a program partnering with independent bookstores to sell their devices.[22] According to the EVP of business development, Todd Humphrey, "From day 1, we made it our goal and a priority to be international... if we weren't international, we were not going to get the scale. We were not going to be able to get the pricing that some of our competitors would get to."[23] In the middle of 2014, Kobo claimed to serve 18 million readers in over 190 countries with over 17,600 online and physical retail channels.[11][24]

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Sony has been in the [e-reader] market in Japan for a long time, but to be perfectly candid, the only company we see as a competitor there is Amazon.”

— Todd Humphrey, Wired.com

This approach led to Wired singling out Kobo as the "only global competitor to Amazon [in the eBook market]".[25] Kobo now claims to have over 20% of the worldwide market, behind only Amazon.com.[26] During the 2011 Christmas period, the company saw a record sevenfold growth in sales.[27][28] On Christmas Day 2012, Kobo claims over 22 million pages were turned.[29] Content revenue increased 44% year over year in 2013.[24]

While hard independent market research numbers do not yet appear to be publicly available for other markets, Michael Serbinis of Kobo has stated that their U.S. marketshare is in the "high single to low double digits."[30] Kobo-owner Rakuten's CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has additionally stated that Kobo is "number one in France; they’re ahead of Amazon in Japan, partially because of us, and Australia and New Zealand as well."[31]

Kobo Inc. released e-book reading data collected from over 21 million readers worldwide in 2014. Some of the data said that only 45% of UK readers finished the bestselling e-book The Goldfinch; this is evidence that while popular e-books are being completely read, many are only sampled.[32]

Market share of e-readers in Canada by Ipsos Reid in January 2012
[33]
Sellers Percent
Kobo
  
 46.0%
Amazon
  
 24.0%
Sony
  
 18.0%
Others
  
 12.0%

Competitors

Bookmate

References

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  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ http://blog.sony.com/2014/02/the-future-of-reader-store/
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Ebooks can tell which novels you didn't finish The Guardian. 10 December 2014.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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