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 […]
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Kindle Unlimited: The Trend Continues, and The House Is On Top
Amazon made their monthly retroactive announcement of how much money they have decided to allocate to authors who participate in Kindle Unlimited, with November’s bounty following the pattern from the prior month. The pool was boosted by $100,000, to $16.3 million, while the total “pages read” declined, to roughly 3.032 billion (down from 3.122 billion in October, and 3.197 billion in September). On online forums, authors continue to complain that Amazon has not fully fixed glitches in their page counting software. Theoretically that’s leading more authors to opt out of publishing exclusively through Kindle and participating in KU. Increasingly, however, the […]
Can BuzzFeed Finally Make Customized Cookbooks Work?
Since the early days of online interfaces and quality print-on-demand manufacturing, a number of companies have taken ultimately unsuccessful passes at building a business around user-customized cookbooks. In the wake of Tastebook and many others comes Tasty: The Cookbook — though this latest effort is driven by BuzzFeed, which is aiming the initiative at their substantial audience of 75 million Facebook followers for their Tasty food vertical. As Fast Company notes, “The company claims 50 percent of all Americans see a Tasty video every month—which back of napkin math equates to almost every Facebook user in the country seeing the content over […]
EU Takes One More Step Towards Maybe Allowing Reduced Tax on eBooks Some Day
The European Union’s achingly slow battle over whether to allow ebooks the same potential for preferential sales tax treatment that print books are given has taken another expected steps towards potential resolution…some time in 2017. Or not. Following on a plan announced this spring, the European Commission has presented a formal proposal for a variety of tax rule revisions. Included in those extensive proposals is one on ebooks that “allow – but not oblige – Member States” to give ebooks (and digital newspapers, magazines, etc.) the same lower or nonexistent VAT status that they give currently to print books. But […]
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 […]
Pottermore Reports Another Big Loss, Still Promising Turnaround
A year ago JK Rowling’s representatives were insisting the worst was behind them after reporting a significant annual loss for Pottermore, citing “recording breaking sales in December 2015” — and now the turnaround story is being pitched again. They are “on the path to profitability” for the fiscal year ending March 2017, but as for the just-reported year ending March 2016 (Companies House filings in the UK have a long time lag), they lost money again. Sales did indeed rise significantly, to £15.1 million pounds, but the site still incurred a pre-tax loss of £4.9 million. In the prior year, […]