More News on Digital Books and Devices to Read Them: the Sony to Kobo transition

by Kasey Cox

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Readers may be surprised to know the first time I felt competition from ereaders, it wasn’t in the form of a Kindle. In the summer of 2008, a customer came to the bookstore to trade in some of her books. She had several long-running series by favorite authors, and had, over the months, enjoyed collecting these books a few at a time until she had the set. I asked her why she wanted to trade in all these books now. Her reply shocked me.

She didn’t have room in her small apartment for all the books she loved to read. So, she was replacing many of the series she’d collected in paperback with digital editions on her new ereader. I had, at that point, only heard a few rumors about Amazon’s new digital reading device, the Kindle. (The very first model had been released, but it wasn’t making a lot of waves yet, even in the techie world, and even less had been said about it in the publishing world.) I asked her if she was getting one of those new gizmos from Amazon – because it’s the only one I’d even heard mentioned. But, no, this customer said she found a much less expensive one at Walmart. She was very pleased with her new Sony ereader: it was easy to use, lightweight, and not glitchy.

Fast forward to spring 2014. We’ve all been through the conflagration of a variety of Kindles; the Google ebook; the Nook; and a storm of “apps” for iPads and Smart Phones. The digital revolution shook the music industry before it swept through the publishing industry, but it’s safe to say, even in this technology world with new developments arriving in the marketplace at an exponential rate, that the book world is quite different from what it was even five years ago.
Here’s a piece of news that a lot of book people don’t know: there are more choices than the Kindle and the Nook. You don’t have to have a Smart Phone to read digital books. You don’t even have to be all that tech-savvy.

While Amazon has been trumpeting from the rooftops about how awesome their Kindle is, while trying to run down and run out competitors in every industry from books to diapers, a Canadian company called Kobo has steadily been making gains in the digital market. If you’ve heard of Kobo, you may recall they started as the small, digital division of a bookstore chain in Canada – just a few folks, nearly a decade ago, who realized they should focus on having a digital library available for their customers, the same way their bookstore already offered audio books, paperbacks, and hardcovers. Ebooks, just as one more choice.

Kobo never intended to sell ereaders – digital devices to use in order to read from the Kobo library. The Kobo library has always been designed in open format – these digital books can be read on any device, including your plain old computer. As the market advanced, and Amazon developed their proprietary devices, Kobo found out, along with the rest of us, that if a consumer buys a Kindle from Amazon, they can only ever buy Amazon’s Kindle books. A Kindle only downloads Kindle format. Kobo’s books, on the other hand, can be read on the Nook, your laptop, an iPad, a Sony ereader, a Smart Phone… but Amazon doesn’t want to play nice with others. And they don’t advertise that fact.

Kobo has since partnered with a Rakuten, a Japanese company, to make top-of-the-line, award-winning devices. Since then, Google has gone through several transitions and their ebook projects have fallen off. Just recently, Sony announced they would no longer be dealing in ereaders, and are transitioning all their ereading customers to the Kobo company, with its enormous digital library of over 4 million titles.

If you are interested in reading digitally, be certain to scrape beyond the surface of the superficial, loud advertisements from your television set, and update your horizons before plunking down your credit card info. Fifteen years ago, even twenty years ago, Amazon and Barnes & Noble made names for themselves in the book business because they were focused on being good stewards in the publishing industry. Now, Amazon wants to take over the world, and Barnes & Noble is really struggling. Am I a biased reporter on this situation? Certainly. Does it make these statements less true? Not in this case. Check out Kobo, both the devices and the digital library available. Pay less attention to the "Great and Powerful (Jeff Bes-)Oz", and more attention to the man behind the curtain and what his company is really doing.