Kobo, the Canadian e-reader, tablet and e-book company owned by Japan’s e-commerce giant Rakuten, today unveiled its newest device, the Aura HD, a limited-edition e-reader it’s aiming it at power bookworms, with a 265dpi resolution on a 6.8-inch screen, 4 gigabytes of storage and a two-month battery life for the premium price of $169.99 (£139.99). The announcement, made in London to coincide with… → Read More
Kobo, the Rakuten-owned e-reading company, has announced that it is to acquire the French digital publishing platform Aquafadas to bolster the breadth of content available on its e-reader devices, for which it claims 10 million users in 190 countries. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
The acquisition gives Kobo access to the Aquafadas Digital Publishing System, which the company says will… → Read More
Kobo announced today via its company blog that the Kobo Glo and Kobo Mini e-readers are now on sale at Canadian retailers Indigo, Future Shop and Best Buy, and in the U.K. at WHSmith. The $80 Mini and $130 Glo were announced in September, just ahead of the unveiling of Amazon’s new Kindle lineup. Kobo also announced today that its Arc 7-inch Android tablet will be hitting store shelves in Nov. → Read More
The big September reveal-a-thon is set to continue tomorrow with some new product announcements courtesy of Amazon, but a rival player in the e-book space is trying to capture some thunder of its own prior to Amazon’s big show.
Rakuten-owned Kobo has just officially unveiled a slew of new e-readers (plus an Android tablet, naturally) in an attempt to cement its place as a serious competitor… → Read More
The headline would make more sense if it read “Android Market Access,” as opposed to “Google Play Access,” but that wouldn’t be technically correct thanks to the Android Market’s rebranding. In any event, Kobo’s Android-powered Vox eReader - the company’s answer to the B&N Nook or Amazon Kindle – is today announcing (at last!) full access to the official Android app store, or whatever you… → Read More
You’d be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Kobo’s Android-powered Vox eReader before — it has a tendency to get glossed over in favor of bigger names like the Kindle or the Nook. Kobo’s hoping to remedy that with another retail push, and this time they’ve inked a deal to get those Vox readers into Best Buy stores across the country. → Read More
If you were thinking of laying out the cash for one of the new touch-based e-readers, now would be a good time. Kobo is dropping the price of its Touch e-reader device, which I reviewed here, to $99 if you’re willing to see ads when the device is sleeping.
That puts it at the same price as the Nook and Kindle – except the Nook is getting a special price this Friday. → Read More
I’m an author, but thankfully I’m not a member of the Authors Guild, that “not-for-profit American organization of and for authors”, who a few days ago issued a statement that first lauded publishers for not signing on to Amazon’s new Kindle book-lending program for Amazon Prime members, and then condemned those few publishers who did agree, citing a convoluted argument that authors aren’t… → Read More
Kobo has partnered with social music discovery and streaming service Rdio to let users of its just-released Android-powered Vox eReader access more than 12 million tracks while they’re reading.
Kobo, which was just acquired by Rakuten for $315 million in cash, says it boasts over five million users worldwide. → Read More
Kobo is about to launch their new Vox ereader/tablet and I think it’s important to remember that the reader race isn’t just down to two contestants: this Canadian company, while comparatively small in the US, is performing quite admirably on the international stage, hitting 2.5 million users in the US and over 5 million total in the world.
The Vox is a fairly nondescript Android tablet running… → Read More
The increasing socialification (as opposed to socialization) of our everyday activities is food for thought. What is it that makes people want to share everything about every activity? Reading especially, to me, has always been more of an escape from the social sphere. Except for on the rare occasions on which I have had to read out loud, books are a way to completely disengage from the constantly… → Read More
Kobo has been cultivating their Reading Life initiative for a while now, and with the announcement of their new Pulse feature, they’re digging even deeper into the social space than before. Slated to launch in their Kobo iOS apps first, Pulse is a new way for readers to connect with others while digitally thumbing through their collections. → Read More
At the beginning of the year, Apple said it wanted 30% of everything sold through the iPad platform. You could sell almost anything – books, downloadable content, magazines, pictures of kittens – but, according to their subscription rules, everything had to go through Apple itself and you could not, in short, go out to a web page to complete the transaction. That promise – to shut down external… → Read More
I almost miss the bad old days. When I first started wandering around some of the more obscure nooks and crannies of this planet, lo these many years ago, Internet connections were rare and wonderful discoveries; now I just get annoyed when I can’t get online. The last decade-and-a-half of innovation has completely transformed the experience of travel. Right now I’m in the middle of a… → Read More
Update: It’s over! Congrats to all the winners – emails have been sent. Thanks for entering, everyone, your bookcases are all very interesting. If you’re curious about the new generation of touchable e-readers, now’s your chance to pick one up just for being a CrunchGear reader. Kobo has been generous enough to donate one of their new eReader Touch Editions for us to give… → Read More
We’ll soon have both of these new e-reader devices for review, but a quick comparison seems in order since they’re so similar on paper. Both are going to be available in early June, and both promise a frills-free touchable reading experience. How do they differ? Let’s run down the specs and see what happens. → Read More
Kobo launched as a Borders-based alternative to the Kindle hegemony, and while their e-reader was perfectly decent, I wouldn’t say it was feature-competitive with Amazon’s latest. They’ve announced today a new device that may not match the Kindle (or its rumored tablet successor) on all fronts, but it’s at least distinct and definitely worth looking at. Yes, a touchscreen e-reader for a reasonable… → Read More
This is a really weird time to be a writer. Agents are becoming publishers; publishers have moved to “the agency model“; and some self-published authors are making millions—all because e-books are now outselling all other segments. Magazines and newspapers are dying, blogs and aggregators are thriving, and the line between them all is blurring. Last year Apple was their savior; now it’s damned… → Read More
Borders took a different route with e-readers than rivals Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Instead of branding their own reader, Borders opted to partner with Kobo, a spin-off of Canadian publishing company, Indigo Books & Music. So, when Borders announced their bankruptcy today, we couldn’t help but wonder what happens next for the Kobo. → Read More
Here we go: the first of the smaller booksellers is hitting the ropes as Borders, a once thriving book chain, files for bankruptcy. The company is closing 200 stores and posted $1.29 billion in debt and $1.27 billion in assets.
The chain was last to market with a usable e-reader platform and still hasn’t gained the traction that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have with the Kindle and Nook. The… → Read More
The Kobo Wireless eReader is a fine device. It uses the same sort of screen found in Kindles and uses Borders for its content. However, the Kindle gets the nod when the Kobo is at its full, $139 MSRP. But Borders has the Kobo on sale for only $99. That’s a deal. → Read More
Book chain Borders sales are looking bleak and the company is apparently not paying publishers. The company is down two-fold over last year and, although some talks point to a potential Barnes & Noble merger, nothing has been finalized. → Read More
Short version: It’s the same thing I reviewed a few months ago, but with wi-fi and an on-device store. They work as well as can be expected on an e-ink device. → Read More
You can now find the Kobo Wireless e-reader on walmart.com. You can also find it in brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart stores, so it all works out. → Read More
Want an alternative to the Amazon Kindle/Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader duopoly? Kobo is always a choice, and now there’s word that you can newspapers and magazines on there, “there” being the Kobo Wireless eReader device as well as the iOS Apps. → Read More
While this blog post over at Tomorrow’s Book has more than a little bitterness to it, it’s also informative. More and more people are choosing to self-publish these days, and even if it’s a hassle, you’d think a new e-book store like Kobo would want to embrace this nascent business model. After all, if you cut out the middle men, you can get right to the chiseling. → Read More
Kobo certainly seems to be hot right now, what with their wireless Kobo reader coming out and all. Well, here’s another feather for Kobo’s e-cap: the Kobo reader software will come preloaded on the BlackBerry PlayBook. → Read More
Borders just announced the release of the wireless version of the Kobo ereader. The Kobo Wireless joins the nook and the non-wireless Kobo reader, but has improved hardware and software, and is priced at a quite reasonable $139.99. → Read More
The e-book world is slowly evolving into a number of fairly similar, homogenized ecosystems. No one wants to be shackled to using a single device to read their e-books: the Kindle is both a device and an app on your smartphone; Apple’s iBook’s is an app on your iPad and your iPhone. And today Kobo is following the trend with the announcement of the Kobo Desktop Application. Like its competitors… → Read More
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