Within the next two to three weeks, Kobo will match Amazon’s ad-bearing ereaders with their own “Kobo Touch with Offers” with “valuable offers and sponsored screens in discreet places outside of the reading experience.” The ad-driven model will sell for just under $100, a $40 discount over the ad-free model. Amazon has begun shipping the Kindle Fire a day early, and will start shipping their new eInk readers tomorrow, six days ahead of the promised date. Early reviews of the Fire are surprised to find that this inexpensive semi-tablet acts like what you would expect for the price. In the […]
eNews
The Books In the Kindle Lending Library
As we’ve been reporting and Amazon Prime customers have learned directly, browsing the Kindle Lending Library in full is difficult and understanding the entire contents of the 5,386-title collection has been unachievable–until now. Our data team has extracted and analyzed a nearly-complete compilation of all but 150 titles in that entire library. (For technical reasons we couldn’t scrape that last little bit; our analysis covers 5,237 titles.) So who is included and how many titles are represented? We have divided our results into three groups. The first is either known or presumed to directly licensed their titles to Amazon on […]
Kobo Expects to Invest “Hundreds of Millions” to Open In “A Couple Dozen” Countries
In interviews following up on Indigo’s deal to sell Kobo to Japan’s Rakuten, Indigo ceo Heather Reisman made it clear that “over the next year, this business will need in excess of $100 million to take it to where this industry is going, and we just cannot play in that league for that amount of capital.” Kobo ceo Michael Serbinis thinks they will need even more investment than that: “Certainly the capital needs in the next couple of years, without revealing too much about strategy, is in the hundreds of millions. And whether a hundred gets you to 6 months […]
Kobo Sold to Japan’s Rakuten for $315 Million
eBook start-up Kobo is being sold to Japanese internet giant Rakuten for $315 million on a fully-diluted basis. Kobo will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity, based in Toronto, Canada. Kobo’s majority shareholder Indigo Books & Music said they expect to receive $140 million to $150 million in proceeds, though they told shareholders “the account gain cannot be determined at this time.” Those proceeds are almost equal to Indigo’s total market cap as of yesterday. As you would expect, their thinly-traded stock jumped by over 50 percent this morning, though at $10.50 a share the price is still well […]
Authors In the Kindle Lending Library: The Complete List
We’ve been finding that a lot of authors, agents and publishers often don’t know that they have books that Amazon has elected to include in the Kindle Lending Library “promotion”–where the etailer pays the full wholesale ebook price. So here is a linked list of all the authors Amazon says are represented in the collection, along with the number of titles matches. (Sometimes Amazon makes a match even if the “author” has contributed just a foreword.) We’ve also been working hard to learn more about the nature of the titles in the collection, through a variety of search routines (none […]
BN Introduces the $249 Nook Tablet, Takes Multiple Shots at the Kindle Fire
You would think the drama would have been taken away from Barnes and Noble’s presentation of their new Nook devices Monday morning in New York, following the thorough (and completely accurate) leaking of that information last week, as we reported on Friday. What’s most important is that BN answered the lingering question of “can they really compete with Amazon?” with a clear indication that they have come to play. What’s more, and unlike previous Nook presentations, the gloves are clearly off and every aspect of Monday’s presentation focused on why BN believes they have better devices and “incredible values” that take Amazon head […]