Chris Walters, a respected tech commenter, and the guy who sat in for me while I took my cross-country motorcycle trip last year, has gotten so fed up with the bloating in the new Kobo app that he just doesn't use it any more.  Here is a part of his post from his Booksprung blog: I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it. This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of...

On Wired’s Epicenter blog, Tim Carmody writes about why he thinks that the main global e-book competitor Amazon has to worry about is Kobo. He points out that while Amazon and Apple have been making highly visible splashes with their new hardware or e-publishing initiatives, Kobo has quietly been building support from a multinational network of bookseller partners, including major booksellers in England, Hong Kong, and France. And now its acquisition by Rakuten adds all of Rakuten’s previously-existing worldwide digital book and media operations to the Kobo brand. “An e-book reader will ultimately not be only...

From the press release: Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 7 million users in over 170 countries worldwide, today announced the integration of Reading Life on the Kobo iOS eReading app with Facebook Timeline; elevating the traditionally solitary pastime of reading into a more dynamic activity to be shared with friends online Kobo is proud to be one of a select few kicking off the launch of apps for Facebook Timeline; apps that allow users to bring their timelines to life through sharing what they’re doing, music they are listening to, books they...

Engadget has the press release from Kobo on the completion of its purchase by e-commerce company Rakuten. Kobo’s HQ will remain in Toronto, though Rakuten is based in Japan. Given that Rakuten owns a lot of popular e-commerce and other industry sites already (including e-tailer Buy.com), it has the potential to give Kobo a lot more expansion and marketing opportunities than its erstwhile partner, the late Borders. Will that be enough to let Kobo catch up with Amazon, or even maintain its lead in international areas Amazon doesn’t service yet? That remains to be seen. But if there...

I have a great interest in GUI (graphical user interface) design and am very sensitive to designs that cause me extra work.  As a matter of fact, after I retired from the law, one of my most interesting second careers was to help design the GUI for a GPS program (since I had been reviewing GPS equipment for years the company thought I'd have a pretty good idea about what worked, or didn't work.)  Being exposed to programmers and designers hightened my interest in GUI design even more. I decided that it would be fun for TeleRead to put up a...

Kobo has a free ebook page here at Top Free eBooks. This page contains in-copyright free ebooks, as opposed to public domain classics.  The "free ebook" link at the top of the Kobo page just points you to public domain stuff.  You need to go to their Top 50 Ebooks page and then to the Top Free eBooks page to get current stuff.  Not very intuitive. Today's top free ebook is The Penguin Holiday eSampler. The Kobo site doesn't seem to have a deal of the day, or at least I can't find it.  When I go to their Great Reads under $4.99...

From the press release: Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 5 million users worldwide, today revealed record sales for the holiday season.  This year the Kobo eReader was a very popular gift with people around the world receiving new Kobo Touch, Kobo Vox eReader and Kobo Wifi devices, driving company sales to a record high. Kobo saw strong momentum with a 10X increase in new customers from the company’s pre-holiday period, and hundreds of thousands of devices were activated each day since Christmas Eve, fuelling the highest eBook download rate in Kobo history – with eBooks being sold to Kobo...

Pocket-lint is reviewing Kobo for Android: Overall the Kobo bookstore seems well stocked and the prices are competitive. The app itself we have found perfectly good for reading and we appreciate the syncing across devices, so we can move from Kobo ereader, to Android phone to iPad, something that was previously the preserve of the Kindle system. The real question is why you'd choose Kobo over the Kindle. Fortunately, as both apps are free and both cover a range of platforms, you don't have to choose. Kobo gives you the diversity to access books from outside their system, as well as move books...

Here's another email to share with you.  This time from Chris Taylor-Davies: I have been reading ebooks for nearly 10 years now, and have amassed a large (perhaps very large) library. After being locked out of some of my early MS Reader purchases I have endeavoured to only buy formats that I can clean the DRM wrapper off for future proofing. This has worked well, and I have been able to bring my books to PDA, Windows Mobile phones, iPhones, Sony Reader and iPad. This is a familiar path to many ebook veterans, but I present this as a bit of...

From the Kobo blog: We are thrilled to announce that Kobo Touch eReader took the top honours and was named Wired Magazine’s Editor’s Pick! Kobo Touch design was described as “handsome and comfortable”, its touch screen as “fastest and most responsive” and our user experience was evaluated as most “intuitive interface and easy to annotate books”. Wired Magazine is amongst the most influential technology magazines with circulation of over 800,000. For their January 2012 issue, Wired magazine evaluated eReading industry’s top contenders for their test-comparison story – Kobo Touch eReader was compared against Nook Simple Touch, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. This news...

eBookNewser reports that Kobo is selling $49 refurbished units of its Kobo Wi Fi reader, the non-touch-capable e-ink reader that it sold before the Kobo Touch. That’s a savings of $40 over list price. The reader appears to come with Kobo’s one-year standard warranty. I bought one of these readers when it was $60 at Borders’s going-out-of-business sale, and my Dad liked it so much he had me grab one for him, too and set it up for him (and now he uses it all the time). If you’re not interested in buying e-books from Amazon or Barnes...

From Engadget comes a review of the new Kobo Vox.  Seems that it is a disappointing entry.  Much more in the review: It's impossible to discuss Kobo's entry into the tablet space without also talking about fellow e-reader makers who have also recently made the leap into tablets. And by that measure, the Vox doesn't look good. It's a piece of last-generation hardware that offers up a limited multimedia experience on the software front. That might have been acceptable six months ago, but the Fire and Nook Tablet have changed the game as far as budget Android tabs go. For its part,...