When I first pointed out that Amazon was moving the price goal posts of its e-readers by referring to the with-ads price as the default rather than the ad-free price, I wondered whether other e-book sellers would be able to follow suit. Now it seems that one has. Kobo will knock $40 off the price of its $139.99 Kobo Touch e-reader for readers who are willing to put up with advertising elements “in discreet places outside of the reading experience,” such as the sleep or power-off mode screen. According to the listing on Kobo’s website, the $99.99 ad-supported reader...

As Amazon goes, so goes Kobo? A report from CBC suggests that would seem to be the case. Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis says that Kobo is developing a publishing arm to offer complete publishing services (including editing and design) for authors who would like to publish through it. It’s not clear from the article whether this service just covers e-books, or is like Amazon’s new publishing division in offering both electronic and print publication services. Either way, it’s one more way e-book-based firms are competing with traditional publishers, though traditional publishers don’t necessarily seem to be worried just yet....

It’s not really much of a surprise anymore given that the word leaked a couple of weeks ago, but Kobo has now officially announced its 7” “Vox” Android 2.3 tablet—though not at the $249 price it had at the time of the leak, but at a Kindle Fire-busting $199 instead. CNet’s David Carnoy says its specs compare more to the Nook Color than the Fire, however, with a slower 800 MHz processor. The best way to describe this is as a more open, generic looking version of the Nook Color, though it is worth mentioning that...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

More information has emerged about the Kobo Vox device we mentioned the other day, thanks to a quickly-yanked premature listing on Canadian Best Buy subsidiary Future Shop. The Vox will apparently be Kobo’s entry into the 7” color Android reader market currently occupied by the Nook Color and Kindle Fire. Judging from the specs on the listing, the Vox would have a 7”, 1024x600-resolution color LCD display; compatibility with Adobe DRM, ePUB, PDF, and Kobo e-book formats; 802.11b/g/n wifi; 8 GB internal memory plus an SD-card slot; and a speaker and headphone jack. Perhaps most intriguingly, the...

Yesterday, perhaps hoping to stage a preemptive strike on Amazon, Barnes & Noble announced a new cooperative venture with self-publisher Lulu.com, which is supposed to make it easier for Lulu customers to get their books published as Nook e-books. However, given that B&N was already partnering with Lulu on self-publishing e-books, it is entirely unclear how it was harder before and how it will be easier now. And this bright bundle of glittering generalities does not seem to have helped in the end. Barnes & Noble’s stock was down by as much as 13% after Amazon’s Kindle announcement today,...

Kobo seems to have a new e-reader or tablet in the offing, Engadget reports, based on testing documents released by the FCC. Not a whole lot of details are present, but Engadget does note that the “Kobo Vox” seems to have a touchscreen and WiFi, but no visible hardware buttons. It features microUSB and microSD card interfaces, which are to be expected—but it also features an earphone jack, which hasn’t been on any Kobo model thus far. With a name like “Vox”, my first inclination is to suspect that this device is going to include the “read aloud” functionality...

Where Amazon had the Kindle and Barnes & Noble had the Nook, Borders chose to partner with Kobo for its e-book store and reader. In the wake of Borders’s bankruptcy, it has been assumed that the licensing agreement with Kobo would be one of the Borders assets that would be auctioned off. (At one point, Borders had an 11% stake in Kobo, though apparently did not as of the bankruptcy.) However, PaidContent reports that Kobo has filed papers with the bankruptcy court overseeing the auction to try to keep that from happening. Apparently Kobo is concerned about what a...

CNet has a quick piece on the continuing Borders liquidation, covering the company that will be selling Border’s intellectual property. The IP includes Borders’s website, as well as a number of IPv4 addresses which have become increasingly valuable now that the hard limit on IPv4 numbers has been reached, It also includes the contractual agreements Borders had with Kobo, in which it owned a minority stake. The liquidator is Streambank, the firm that is also handling the liquidation of Circuit City’s intellectual property (which, despite the chain having closed two years ago, still hasn’t been sold yet). Sadly from...

EBookNewser has a short piece on Inkmesh, a sort of MySimon-style price-comparison site for e-books. The piece uses the example of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which “costs $5.00 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony. It’s $6.99 from BooksOnBoard, $7.99 from the iBookstore and $9.99 from the Diesel eBookstore, eBooks.com and Kobo.” This puzzles me more than a little, given that I thought one of the chief tenets of agency pricing was that e-books were supposed to be the same price everywhere. If that’s no longer true (as this report a few days ago suggests...

Peter Kafka at All Things D takes a look at the strategies that various media companies are using to deal with Apple’s newly-enforced insistence on a cut of the take from any in-app purchases. Some are acquiescing, or passing the added cost onto consumers. Some are staying in the store and removing the in-app purchase links. Others are trying an end-run around the restrictions altogether, as with Amazon’s released or Kobo’s planned HTML5 apps. I wonder if Apple’s restrictions will end up having any repercussions? We’ve already seen lawyers going after Apple and publishers over agency pricing. Apple seems...

We don't know whether someone at Kobo voluntarily decided to do it, or whether the Apple ebook police demanded it (but the second option is a lot more likely), but the two links to the Kobo web store have been removed from the News feed of its iOS app. If there's any good news to this, it's that the post still lays the blame for the store removal squarely on Apple. At least as of today. Via The Digital Reader ...