Rakuten Kobo announced on Tuesday they have signed contracts to acquire the Tolino ebook technology platform serving the German-language ebook market from founding partner Deutsche Telekom at the end of January 2017, pending approval from the German Federal Cartel Office. (That paperwork was filed December 22.) Kobo will join the three bookseller partners Hugendubel, Thalia and Weltbild. CEO Michael Tamblyn says in the announcement, “Together with our partners from the German book trade, we intend to continue to enhance the tolino ecosystem for its many dedicated customers. This acquisition allows us to bring Rakuten Kobo’s experience with collaborating with book retailers around […]
ebookstores
International Briefs: Kobo, Amazon, Luebbe and More
The rest of the world was open for business all week long and accounts for much of the catch-up news: – Kobo has now redirected their efforts to sell ebooks and ereading devices in Spain towards their France-based retail partner Fnac. The relationship has been expanded to Spain, where Fnac has 50 stores. Kobo first opened their own local ebookstore in 2011 and sells titles in Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician. In 2013 they had partnered with La Central’s group of seven stores. – Germany’s Luebbe has sold 80 percent of their gift product line Rader for 14.1 million euros, valuing the company at about one […]
Waterstones Exits eBooks and Digital Audio; Transfers Customers to Kobo
Waterstones is giving up on ebooks again and — perhaps more importantly in the long-term, also walking away from the still-growing digital audio market. The company told their digital media customers by email and posted site notice that “the Waterstones digital download store is closing,” and digital files are no longer available for sale on their web site. Customers who purchased ebooks are having their libraries transferred to Kobo, as of June 14. Digital audio customers are being abandoned in full; their only recourse is to “please ensure that all the MP3s in your library are downloaded to your chosen […]
eBooks: Kobo in Mexico, Amazon In NY Schools
Kobo is joining with Mexican publisher and retailer Libreria Porrúa (with almost 70 bookstores) and bookstore chain Gandhi (with close to 30 stores) to power a new ereading service for Mexican readers called Orbile. They plan to launch an ebookstore in September with a catalog that will include over 70,000 titles. Both Porrúa and Gandhi will sell Kobo devices in their stores. Separately, the New York City Board of Education has a pending three-year contract with Amazon for ratification that will pay the etailer at least $30 million for ebooks selected by individual schools. Amazon will also build a “unified ebook storefront” for the […]
Harper Likes $14.99
After we reported a week ago that Harper told a wide swath of ebook accounts that they would return to full agency for ebooks as of Tuesday morning Pacific time, the big question wasn’t so much Amazon as pricing. In September 2012, when HarperCollins was the first settling publisher to comply with the consent decrees through “agency lite” pricing, they also raised many of their consumer list ebook prices, often by many dollars above the original iBooks pricing “brackets” that pegged ebook prices to print book prices. As it turned out, Harper was the only of the settling publishers to […]
German Giant Media-Saturn Looks to Build On Bankrupt Txtr
Some publishers were recently informed via email that Germany’s txtr, which filed for bankruptcy in late January, will be adopted as the ebook platform for the big consumer electronics retailing group Media-Saturn-Holding as of the beginning of April. (Described as the Best Buy of Germany and/or Europe, the group’s Media Markt, Saturn and Redcoon stores have annual sales of over 20 billion euros.) It’s a logical marriage of convenience, in that txtr was already working with MSH on their ebook plans. MSH is currently working to turn JUKE! — an established streaming music subscription service — into a much broader digital […]