Kobo is trying a unique strategy to lure readers away from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble by promising regular free e-books. Anyone who buys a Kobo Touch and first uses it on or before March 31 gets a free e-book each month. The publishers include Harvard Business Review Press, e-Reads, F+W Media, Gooseberry Patch, and New Word City, as well as four independent authors.
More great Cyber Monday deals keep popping up that are too good to pass on. Buy.com has cut the price on the Kobo Touch eReader with special offers is available today for only $69.99 after a $30 price break, FREE shipping is included. Head to RadioShack.com for some great prices on stocking stuffer items like the Skullcandy Ink'd earbuds, today only $12.99, or the XtremeMac Tuffwrap Textured iPod touch protective case now only $14.99.
Kobo has fired back at Amazon's Kindle Touch by launching its own Kobo Touch with Offers. The six-inch touchscreen e-reader brings in the same concept of ads in the screensaver or home screen to help subsidize the price. The option helps drop the price by $40 over the original Kobo Touch and puts it at the same $100 price as its Amazon equivalent.
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten said late Tuesday that it was buying Kobo for $315 million in cash. The deal gives it access to both an e-bookstore and e-reader devices, including traditional devices like the Wireless eReader and Android tablets like the Kobo Vox. Rakuten explained it as a push to expand its ecosystem outside of Japan through a media store, where books would just be the start.
Kobo has announced plans to launch its own publishing service to complement its e-book distribution business. The company is said to be readying a range of publishing services, working directly with authors to edit content and establish book designs.
Kobo has now officially revealed its 7-inch Vox Android tablet, offering it p for pre-order. It will cost $200 and sport an 800MHz processor along with 512MB of RAM. For storage, 8GB is built-in and up to 32GB more can be added thanks to an SD memory card.
Kobo's seven-inch Vox Android tablet very briefly showed up on Canadian retailer's Future Shop website on Thursday, though it has since been pulled, The Digital Reader reported. Despite this, official specs were gleaned, and an image capture of the webpage in question is available. The price tag was set at $250 CAD ($242) and the release date was October 17, at least in Canada.
A new mystery e-book reader tablet from Kobo has just showed up undergoing FCC testing. While not much is known about it, other than the Kobo Vox name and an eReader Tablet description, it does also appear to have a touchscreen. The profile photo also reveals a microUSB port and a headphone jack, suggesting some sort of multimedia capabilities.
Kobo's eReader Touch Edition is now available at Best Buy stores, with Kobo specialists in place at stores to demonstrate the devices to would-be buyers. The $130 device will also show up in other retail stores before year's end.
Kobo on Tuesday set out a plan for an HTML5 e-reading app to circumvent Apple's app purchasing rules. The app won't be a direct replacement but will let iPad and iPhone users buy directly from the same interface they use to read books. Kobo made clear it felt Apple was artificially limiting competition and hurting the reading experience.
Amazon on Monday gave into Apple's demands and pulled the Kindle Store button from its iOS app (free, App Store). Following similar moves by Google, Kobo, and the WSJ, Kindle readers using version 2.8 and up will now have to purchase the books on the web and only sync them through the iPad or iPhone. Apple as of July officially allows only its own store to have a direct purchase link.
Kobo and the Wall Street Journal said Sunday they would stop offering a direct gateway to buying books or subscriptions through their iPad and iPhone apps. Both had decided to follow Apple's new iOS subscription rules barring links to something other than iTunes. Purchases for either will have to now go through the web without direct links.
Kobo reached out to assuage readers in the wake of Borders' eventual death with promises that devices like the eReader Touch Edition and book purchases would carry over. The e-book firm had already been moving customers over from the Borders-specific accounts over to Kobo's own. Readers should have access to all the same books but also stay more current on apps and features.
Borders on Monday night said it would effectively shut down as it planned to liquidate its business. Following unsuccessful tries at selling itself following its Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company planned to sell all 399 of its stores and their assets to two liquidation companies, Gordon Brothers and Hilco. The clearout would start as soon as Friday with the entire process wrapped up by September.
Barnes & Noble scored a symbolic win on Friday as the new touchscreen Nook topped the Amazon Kindle in Consumer Reports' new e-reader ratings [sub. required]. The new Nook reached 78 points to the Kindle 3G's 77 owing to the simpler, much more focused design. Many features were equal, and the Nook just edge Amazon's reader in format support.
A new law passed last week by France's National Assembly could have repercussions for e-book pricing beyond the country itself. Known just as a "prix du livre numérique" (price of digital books) law, it would update the country's Lang Law from 1981 to require that books with a French publisher be sold in France at no more than a five percent discount below the list price. The requirement is irrespective of the company's origin and would make e-book providers like Amazon, Apple, or Kobo follow French rules even though they were located in North America.
Kobo this morning put itself back into contention in the e-reader space at BookExpo America by launching the eReader Touch Edition. Its new model has a namesake six-inch, infrared-based touchscreen that simplifies the interface even further with swipe and zoom gestures along with taps. The reader should also be an upgrade to the experience itself, getting both a faster, higher-contrast E Ink Pearl screen as well as a faster Freescale i.MX507 processor to speed screen redraws.
Kobo and Best Buy on Thursday partnered to sell the Kobo Wireless eReader in Best Buy stores and on the retailers web sites for the first time. Also, to mark Mother's Day, the device will be on sale for $100 before returning to its regular $130 price tag on May 14. The device was only available through Borders stores before this announcement.
E Ink global sales head Sri Peruvemba in an interview Monday both dampened hopes for a sequel to its Pearl e-paper displays while promising a major leap with the next release. He told CNET not to expect any replacement in 2011 but promised much better performance. The next generation could display full-motion video, or at least 24 frames per second.
RIM has often been the definition of conservative: for the past few years, the BlackBerry has almost always been slight variations on a theme and still devoted to the suit-and-tie audience. The BlackBerry PlayBook is the first real sign of the Waterloo company trying to shake its stigma with a genuinely new interface and an emphasis on 3D games and other features that would have been borderline heretical in the past. And, for some, an admission that Apple caught it off-guard with the iPad. We'll find out in our review of the PlayBook whether the tablet is enough to break free of a limiting reputation -- and whether the iPad 2 should be looking over its shoulder.
Kobo has just announced securing $50 million in investment, the majority of which came from who is only being identified as a "leading institutional investor." The rest, $13 million, came from existing investors. This money will be used to fund Kobo's international growth, said Kobo CFO Greg Twinney.
Amazon up-ended the e-reader market on Monday with word of an ad-sponsored version of the Kindle. Called just the Kindle with Special Offers, it will have ads both on the bottom of the home page and on its idle screens. The new reader would drop the price by $25 over a Wi-Fi version and should ship both online and through Best Buy and Target on May 3.
RIM enterprise strategy VP David Heit at a Boston event said the BlackBerry PlayBook would have an official video chat app. Instead of relying on third-party apps like Android, it should have a new peer-to-peer app intended for all users, similar to FaceTime. Heit didn't tell PCWorld if it would use a standard that would allow chatting with other platforms or if it would be limited to the PlayBook, although the current roadmap shows no BlackBerry phones with front cameras this year.
RIM late Tuesday scored a deal to give the BlackBerry PlayBook a preloaded music store. 7digital's store will be preloaded on the tablet and give access to about 13 million pay-per-track songs. The store is the most popular on BlackBerry phones and is one of the few to have an international scope, having grown beyond Europe to reach the US two years ago.
Barnes & Noble in posting results for its most recent quarter late Tuesday claimed to have gained market share for e-books in the US. The company claimed to have moved from its usual fifth of the market to 25 percent. It tied the success to that of the Nook and noted that it was selling twice as many e-books as any paper books online.
Last week's unofficial report of the Borders Group's near bankruptcy status is now official, as the company detailed its plans. The company has filed a petition for reorganization relief under Chapter 11 after the authorization of its board of directors. The deal will secure commitment for $505 million in debtor-in-possession financing from GE Capital, Restructuring Finance.
Borders' financial troubles in the e-book era could come to a head early next week after a leak has revealed it's close to bankruptcy. The bookseller is now believed to be filing a non-permanent Chapter 11 bankruptcy as soon as Monday or Tuesday. Its plan would see it get debtor-in-possession financial backing during the bankruptcy of as much as $450 million from Bank of America or GE, but it would also close 200 of its existing 674 stores, the WSJ sources behind the leak said.
Borders has been delaying payments to book publishers in signs that it may be one of the first major victims of e-books. Early reports from Publishers Marketplace on Friday said it was putting off the payments to help refinance its debt but also wasn't certain that the plan would be effective. It might have to break its existing credit deals early into 2011 after facing a "liquidity shortfall," it said.
Kobo on Monday has issued a statement that talks about strong sales of its hardware and e-books over the holiday season, following competitor Amazon's similar announcement from earlier in the day. While exact numbers weren't revealed, Kobo did say more than one million readers connected to Kobo's online service, with "hundreds of thousands" of the company's eReaders activated every day since Christmas Eve. This helped the company to achieve its highest e-book download rate to date.
Kobo on Friday introduced an update to its e-reader app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch (free, App Store). Chief among the changes is the introduction of Instapaper. Like the stand-alone service, it lets users save web content for reading offline later. Users can sync their Kobo apps with Instapaper as they would any other title.
RIM today began accepting BlackBerry PlayBook app submissions for an eventual posting to BlackBerry App World. The primarily AIR- and Flash-based apps that pass approval should go up when the PlayBook releases early next year. Developers can write apps in Linux, the Mac and Windows, with recent addition bringing 64-bit Windows development and emulation support in Linux.
Borders might buy out Barnes & Noble in what could be a major shakeup in the e-reader space, according to an SEC filing. Borders has said it might buy its rival bookseller for $16 per share or else a mixture of cash and stock. There is "no assurance" that a deal will be finished, Borders cautioned.
In just the space of half a year, competition in the e-reader market has grown intense: where anything below $200 was once basic, readers now expect Internet access on anything over $100. Kobo has had to ride this wave whether it liked it or not: its new mainstream model has actually dropped to $140 while getting Wi-Fi. But is that enough? We'll discover the answer in our Kobo Wireless eReader review.
The New York Times today planned to run a bestseller list just for e-books. The list will be separate from the paper list but will appear in the Book Review both online and in print versions of the newspaper. An independent tracker, RoyaltyShare, will monitor sales from a collection of digital bookstores and will help validate the data to ensure that it's accurate, an issue which the Times said was currently a problem in the e-book field.
Kobo today formally launched magazine and newspaper subscriptions across its platforms. Both the Wireless eReader as well as the iPad and iPhone apps can subscribe to and download periodicals with much of the formatting intact. Some though not all titles will sync their positions much like regular books.
Borders said it would start up multiple deals, beginning October 31, in what's already considered a bid to recover sagging sales. The company dropped the price of its core readers, the Kobo eReader and the Aluratek Libre, down to $100; the Libre deal lasts until November 15. It should also be giving away five free books with each Kobo Wireless eReader at its usual $140 price, and Sony Readers will get a free cover and light combo.
Kobo this evening revealed that a version of its eReader app will be preloaded on the BlackBerry PlayBook from the start. RIM said picked the eReader hardware maker as Kobo had an international e-bookstore and was adept at customizing for specific countries. The bookseller in turn said that a WebKit browser made it an ideal fit since it uses the same engine for many of its existing apps, including those on the iPad.
Kobo this morning quickly improved its competitive stance through the Wireless eReader. The device keeps the design of the already reviewed original but now has 802.11g Wi-Fi. The addition both simplifies shopping by downloading directly to the e-reader but also enables automatic subscription downloads for magazines and newspapers as well as syncing of titles between the eReader and mobile apps.
E-book reader service and hardware maker Kobo on Wednesday announced it has released an app called the Kobo Desktop Application. Free to download, it lets users browse and shop for e-books from their notebook or desktop computers. Users can also use third-party readers to access their digital book libraries thanks to the app.
Borders this morning fought back against the third-generation Kindle by dropping prices on both the Aluratek Libre and the Kobo eReader. Although not yet reflected on the site, the Kobo device is dropping down to $130 while Aluratek's device is falling to $100, making it one of the first current e-readers to crack the price mark.
Sharper Image today took its turn at e-readers with the Literati. The MerchSource-made device takes its styling cues from Amazon's Kindle but uses a seven-inch, 800x480 LCD to show cover art and photos in books. The device has Wi-Fi to get online but uses it only for downloading books from Kobo's online bookstore; the company has deliberately omitted the web and apps.
Fairmont Hotels will give their Gold members at ten locations in the US and Canada the opportunity to use a Kobo eReader during their stay. Each contains new Random House bestsellers and have access to the Kobo e-book store for purchasing other books. When guests return their readers, they will get coupons for $2 off certain Random House e-books.
Amazon in a rare evening launch revealed its third-generation Kindle reader. The new hardware is 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the model it replaces but is better in nearly every way. It uses a new E Ink Pearl display with 50 percent better contrast and 20 percent faster page turns but can now last for up to a month with wireless off on battery, twice as much as before, and for up to 10 days with wireless on.
Borders today formally launched its eBooks store. The launch follows the early release of the iPad and iPhone apps (free, App Store) and will give Borders one of the largest online catalogs with 1.5 million titles, an unknown amount of which are public domain. The company also formally posted Android and BlackBerry versions of its mobile app.
After inspiring the Kobo eReader and originally geared toward the iPad, Kobo has now brought its eReading app up to iOS 4 compatibility. The app, which opens up access to numerous eBooks in the Kobo library uses Kobo-optimized formatting, offers alternate appearances for bookmarks and an 'I'm Reading' feature for quickly switching between active books. It can sync across multiple platforms.
Borders on Tuesday said it would bundle its Kobo eReader with a $20 gift card and double Borders Bucks. At the same time, the company has released a free app for both the Apple iPhone and iPad that will let users browse, search, buy and read its e-books. The Apple app is Kobo's second for mobile devices, with an Android app unveiled on Friday and a BlackBerry app promised to arrive soon as well.
A leak from Barnes & Noble's inventory system is likely to have confirmed rumors of an entry level Nook coming by the end of spring. The listing for a "Nook WiFi" shows it shipping for $149 on June 23. Not much else is detailed by Engadget's insider, but prior leaks had it stripping out 3G to fall below the regular Nook's $249 asking price.
Borders has released a Kobo app for Android-powered smartphones, letting them read all of Borders' electronic books. The app is considered a mobile complement to the Kobo eReader. As with the iPhone app and other ports, a login lets the software bookmark where readers left off, even if they switch the device used to read the e-book.
Apple's claim that it garnered 22 percent of e-book sales in the US isn't truly accurate, analysts warned this afternoon. The figure is only among the five major publishers that have agreed to sell through the iBookstore and doesn't count Random House, which sells through Amazon but doesn't yet support Apple. Independent publishers also aren't factored into the data.
Borders on Friday started taking pre-orders for its version of the Kobo eReader. The American version of the reader will go on sale June 17th and, like the Canadian version, will have 100 public domain books already loaded. Price will still be its key selling point as the reader should cost $150.
