From Engadget:

[Kobo] has announced a new reader that once again rethinks the standard 6-inch screen. With the Aura HD, Kobo is going big, extending things to 6.8 inches, putting it closer to tablet size. With that upgrade comes an impressive resolution: 1,440 x 1,080 (compared to the 1,024 x 768 on the Paperwhite and 1,024 by 758 on the Glo). It’s a product focused on hardcore readers. “We got 10,000 customers together across dozens of countries to ask them what we can do for them,” Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis explained. As such, it’s a limited edition offering, one not destined to replace the flagship Glo.

. . . .

The Aura HD is a new form factor for Kobo, a large-format reader with a high-res, 6.8-inch screen, but it’s a size the company has no intention of extending beyond the end of the year. Of course, if the device proves a runaway success, Kobo would certainly be amenable to rolling out a larger-screened device as a mainstream product. “If we hear from our customers that this is the best thing since sliced bread,” says Serbinis, “it’s going to be hard for us not to listen to that.” In the meantime, there’s a fair chance the added bulk and price will be enough to doom the product to the world of niche devices.

Link to the rest at Engadget

Passive Guy wonders why Kobo spent the money to create and launch a limited edition ereader. Perhaps the company had already sunk a bunch of cash into the device but then concluded that tablets were the wave of the future. It does feel awkward.

From Publishing Trends:

Though the holiday sales rush is over, there’s still no shortage of talk about ereading devices. The only problem? The market and technology has grown so much in the past year that “ereader” has come to mean so much more than dedicated devices such as the Nook Simple Touch or Kindle Paperwhite. This past month brought a lot of speculation as to whether or not the tablet has more or less killed the ereader. With tablet sales soaring, signs point to ‘yes,’ but some predict that ereaders will bounce back in the new year and that heavy book consumers still prefer the simpler device.

. . . .

“As more Android-based tablets are set to release in the coming months, Finvista Advisors’ analyst Sameer Singh believes that 2013 will likely mark the year iOS will lose its tablet dominance to the little green robot. However, that projection is based on an 18% drop in iPad sales for Q3 2012, when people were waiting for Apple‘s iPad mini announcement. Now that the mini has been released and deemed a bona fide success, it’s unclear if 2013 will be the tipping point, after all.”

. . . .

“A chirpy Kobo has claimed it now has more than 12 million registered users, four million of them creating ebook buyer accounts with the company during 2012.

It lauded its device sales too – well, its e-ink kit, not its Android-based tablet offerings – insisting it had captured 20 per cent of the world ereader market in 2012.”

–Tony Smith, The Register (1/17/2013)

“Sales of the iPad 4 were not expected to be harmed by the smaller, sleeker and cheaper iPad Mini. As the king of touch screen devices, Apple was thought to be the one company that could overcome any risk of cannibalization.

According to Reuters, that may not be the case. The publication reports that Sharp (one of Apple’s largest display suppliers) has significantly reduced the production of screens for the full-size iPad.”

–Louis Bedigian, Forbes (1/1/2013)

Link to the rest at Publishing Trends

From Ebook Friendly:

Free ebooks are not very well highlighted on Kobo (it’s actually the problem with most ebookstores). There are over 1 million free ebooks here, most of them are classic literature from public domain. To browse for free ebooks, simply perform any search and then from a drop down list select Free Only. You can further sort titles by ratings, title, or publication date.

Alternatively, you can use a landing page for free Kobo ebooks. The link is kobobooks.com/free_ebooks. From here you will be able to check top free books in six categories, including romance, mysteries, and classics.

Link to the rest at Ebook Friendly

Kobo is offering its Mini eRreader for $49.99 from December 21-23.

Link to the rest at Kobo and thanks to Barb for the tip.

From FutureBook:

Publishers have “done a lot right” and are standing in a much stronger position in the digital market compared with three years ago, Pottermore c.e.o. Charlie Redmayne told delegates at The Bookseller‘s FutureBook 2012 Conference in London this morning (3rd December).

In a keynote speech, Redmayne said there had been too much negativity in the industry and that publishers were now in a position they would have thought “a dream” a couple of years back, with multiple retailers for them to sell their e-books through.

While Amazon is a “dominant” player, a “fantastic partner for publishers”, they now also have Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo—”who have done such an extraordinary job”—and Google, which Redmayne predicted would be “a serious player in the e-book market in the next couple of years”.

However publishers need to step up and own innovation and creativity on the new devices, he warned, emphasising that developing big brands and harnessing fanbases were crucial.

Redmayne recommended that publishers and film companies “get together and merge rights”, saying they need to “work with all rights-holders to create products across platforms.”

. . . .

Also giving a keynote speech, Kobo chief Michael Serbinis told delegates that the company is planning more international expansion in 2013.

. . . .

The Kobo boss also revealed the company had achieved 600% sales growth year-on-year in the UK, which included 115% catalogue growth, 280% year-on-year growth in users, 400% growth in e-book downloads and 100% growth in device sales. He was pleased that the DigiTimes last month reported the company had now gained a 20% hold of the global e-reading market.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

From The National Post:

Sarah MacLachlan remembers her first e-reader. It was the Rocket eBook, which lifted off in 1998 and soon crashed back to earth. Although the device never caught on, MacLachlan, then a VP at Publisher’s Group West, ever so briefly glimpsed the future.

“I gave the Rocket eBook to my then nine-year-old daughter,” recalls MacLachlan, now the president and publisher of House of Anansi Press. “They had already loaded onto it Alice in Wonderland. And she read all of [it] on the Rocket eBook. And it didn’t phase her one bit. And I thought, well, that’s interesting …

“I will admit to not thinking it would take off in the way it ultimately has,” she adds.

. . . .

But how to harness this? That’s something Anansi is still figuring out. On a recent Friday morning, members of the Anansi brain trust — MacLachlan, editor Jared Bland and Erin Mallory, the company’s manager, cross-media group — meet with Jeffrey Remedios and David Harris, the president and co-founder and vice-president of marketing and business development, respectively, of Toronto indie music label Arts & Crafts, to discuss ways the two companies could work together on digital initiatives.

“There’s probably some learned lessons that we could try to distill and share with you,” Remedios says. “Napster came in in ’99 and completely disrupted the music industry. The music industry’s reaction was to try to sue Napster out of business. It took from ’99 until April ’03 for the industry to actually have an economically driven response to the mp3, and that was through Apple.”

“I think the difference between what happened with music and what is happening with books is that we did sort of learn from music,” MacLachlan says.

. . . .

Since many Anansi’s books were acquired before the existence of e-readers, and therefore before the existence of digital rights, they’ve had to negotiate with authors throughout the process. Digital rights, says Matt Williams, the company’s vice-president of publishing operations, only began to appear in contracts around the turn of the century. “There are a couple of authors … who have not given us e-book rights,” he says.

. . . .

Mallory envisions transforming the print product into something with audio, video and photographic slide shows. “A companion piece to the print edition, rather than a strict replication,” she says.

“What would you price a product like that?” Harris asks.

“The Northwords pieces, as a compilation — there were five pieces — is $4.99,” MacLachlan says.

. . . .

Digital revenues at Anansi are growing. Last year, e-books accounted for 8% of sales. “So far in 2012, we’re running about double that — 16% of so,” Williams says. “For a bestseller like The Sisters Brothers that percentage is slightly higher, in that case about 19%.” A recently-published study by BookNet Canada revealed that e-books now account for approximately 16% of the Canadian market.

Of digital sales, they sell the most e-books through Kobo, which was launched by Indigo in 2009 but is now owned by Japanese conglomerate Rakuten. Amazon’s Kindle does not have a Canadian store, though MacLachlan wouldn’t oppose one: “I think it would be good if they started a store. And I probably will be villified for having said so. I think the more, the merrier.”

Link to the rest at The National Post

From The Digital Reader:

Paul Durrant, a fellow ebook enthusiast whom I know through MobileRead Forums, decided last week to push Kobo to explain the specific details of the T&C we all agree to.

Kobo’s contract with users is fairly standard boilerplate, and there was one particular clause which  says that a “Registered Users” cannot share the ebooks, yada, yada, yada. It’s boilerplate, but if you cannot guess what it says click on the link above.

The thing is, the only person who is  “Registered Users” is the one whose name is on the account. So naturally this raises questions about whether someone’s spouse can use the account. Now that is an interesting question, isn’t it?

A straightforward reading of the T&C says that you cannot share an account between several people, something which is quite common.

Paul wanted to know if that was really what Kobo meant to disallow when they wrote the contract. And after he sent several emails and received 2 irrelevant replies, this was what he was told:

Legally, only the account holder has license to use the material.

That’s a very interesting answer, because it means that there are potentially millions of Kobo users currently in violation of Kobo’s T&C. They are all at risk of having their account closed and losing access to their ebooks.

But what’s even more interesting is that apparently Kobo expects you to buy a separate copy of an ebook for each person in your household who want to read it!

Heck, that’s something I didn’t even do for paper books, and it’s certainly not something I’m going to start doing for ebooks. And while I’m sure it’s some publishers wishing for this more than Kobo, this still came from Kobo customer service and the Kobo T&C.

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader and thanks to Eric for the tip.

Tech companies typically don’t think about their Terms and Conditions becoming the source of bad publicity. In fact, nobody from Marketing or PR even reads the things. From PG’s extensive experience with inside counsel at tech companies, he guarantees that almost none of these otherwise skilled lawyers ever considers customer backlash when drafting the T’s & C’s.

That may change.

From Galleycat:

Kobo has also expanded its self-publishing platform Kobo Writing Life by adding new languages. As of today,  the tools are available in German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. The company has plans to release functionality in additional languages over the coming months.

Link to the rest at Galleycat

From TeleRead:

I personally think the Kindle is a superior product to the Kobo, but in this area of technology, geography matters. The Kobo is a much, much bigger deal in Canada and many international markets than it is in the United States, and that should not be underestimated. Every single person I know who owns a Kobo only bought one because, when they decided they wanted an e-book reader, they went to the bookstore … and Kobo readers were what they had.

. . . .

And of course, now that so many Canadian readers are used to the Kobo interface, and are buying their books from the Kobo store, and are experimenting with some of Kobo’s better proprietary features—like the reading stats—they are quite happy to stay with Kobo …

. . . .

Back in the old days, when all you could do was read, people didn’t care so much about one brand or another. But now that more robust features are becoming available—and some of them proprietary at that—people are starting to shop for them.

My sweetie was happy as a clam with his Kobo Touch a week ago, but now that all the new stuff is coming, he’s eying the Kobo Glo. The lit screen, to him, is worth the upgrade. He’ll buy it just for that. Similarly, I have chosen to upgrade in the past for features like text to speech, multilingual dictionary support and even form factor.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

From The Bookseller:

 Kobo has announced three new devices as it steps up the pressure to win market share from rival e-book retailer Amazon in the run-up to Christmas.

Two new e-readers will come from the Rakuten-owned company on 1st October, with a tablet device with two different capacities appearing in November.

. . . .

Kobo’s new devices are the Kobo Glo, with a six-inch, e-ink, illuminated screen for night-time as well as day-time reading, which will sell for £99.99. The second new e-reader announced today is the Kobo Mini, with a small five-inch screen, which comes with interchangeable backs in different colours and is “fully customisable”. It will sell for £59.99. Sameer Hasan, director of program management for Kobo, said: “We believe that big things come in small packages—the Kobo Mini is easy to hold, portable and has beautiful attention to detail, targeting young, fashion-conscious stylish people.”

As for Kobo’s new tablet, the company will release the Kobo Arc nearer Christmas, most likely in November, with a seven-inch screen with a HD display which customers can use to access apps, play films and videogames, look at photos as well as read e-books.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller