From Shelf Awareness: There is a significant difference in usage patterns between owners of dedicated e-readers and tablets, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said during a panel held at the Financial Times Digital Media Conference in London last week, as reported by TabTimes. "The people buying these devices (e-readers) are reading more frequently than those with tablets," Serbinis observed. "They read for longer sessions and are more committed. We definitely see tablets as for casual readers. These readers are reading a book every other month, which is a lot less than the average for those using e-readers. Some...

From the press release: TORONTO, March 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Comic lovers around the world, get ready to turn a new page. Kobo Inc. today announced an exciting new partnership that will see Dark Horse Comics’ best-selling titles immediately available on the Kobo Vox eReader. Dark Horse is one of the world’s leading and most innovative comic companies, bringing readers titles such as Mass Effect, Star Wars, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy and Sin City. “All of us at Kobo are thrilled to be adding Dark Horse’s amazing titles to our library,” says Michael Tamblyn, EVP Content, Sales & Merchandising. “Based on...

I just noticed that an e-book I reviewed here some time ago, Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is currently being offered as a free Kindle e-book. (Barnes & Noble and Kobo do not appear to be following suit; the book is still $8.19 for the Nook or $7.69 for the Kobo (or $9.99 DRM-free from Kobo. Is this new, offering a DRM-free book at a higher price?). But if you want to buy it, you should get it for $6 DRM-free from Baen instead.) The book is the novelization of the first part of...

From the press release: Kobo Inc. today announced that the company will be one of the first eBook retailers to have an app featured in the Windows Store concurrent with the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Built using HTML and Java Script, Kobo’s app offers a personalized, secure and central destination where people can manage their entire Kobo reading experience. The new app was one of just a handful selected for release with the Consumer Preview of Windows 8. The new Kobo app offers new and exciting features: * Revamped Look and Feel - A new and improved interface...

A reminder today that, if you self-publish with Amazon, you’re not guaranteed to be in control of your e-book pricing. Fantasy author Jim C. Hines recounts a recent pricing snafu with his e-book Goblin Tales, self-published through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. Hines had put the book on sale for 99 cents over Christmas and returned it to $2.99 in January (though apparently Kobo was slow to respond to Hines’s pricing change, meaning that his book was at 99 cents for a few weeks longer than he intended thanks to Amazon’s price-matching algorithm). Then on February 11th Hines...

From the press release: Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 7 million users in 170 countries worldwide, today announced the in-store availability of the Kobo Vox eReader at Best Buy stores across the United States and online at www.bestbuy.com. The Kobo Vox eReader, will be sold at Best Buy for $199 (USD), has seen strong adoption worldwide including Canada, the U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand.  The Kobo Vox offers a superior reading experience with access to Kobo’s eBookstore that offers over 2.5 million eBooks, of which a million available to download and read for free.  Best Buy will offer the Kobo Vox...

Nico Vreeland's earlier post, which Teleread reprinted earlier, was one of many articles I have lately seen which explore the issue of the publishers versus Amazon. Is Amazon evil? Are their business practices 'predatory' and should publishers be trying to disable them? More and more, I am thinking the answer to these questions is no. Amazon is not evil. They have just figured out what the customers want better than anybody else has so far, and they are giving it to them. Vreeland points out, correctly, that customers don't buy 'Random House books' or 'Penguin Books.' They buy Stephen King...

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...