Kobo has apparently been seeing a good deal of misunderstanding going around about its relationship to the embattled Borders chain. The company issued a statement today intended to clear up those misconceptions, pointing out that it is a separate company in no danger of closing. Though Borders owns a 11% minority stake in the company, it does not depend on Borders for its content but has its own separate agreements with publishers.
The statement also points out that existing Borders customers are being transitioned over to have Kobo accounts that include all the e-books they originally purchased from Borders. Owners of Kobo e-readers will still be able to make purchases through the Kobo e-book store.
it’s good that Kobo is going to continue in business; the company seems to be doing all right for itself even if it’s not as popular as the Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Certainly it is carving out a niche in the simple, inexpensive e-reader market.
Why do you think the iPad is a competitor to the Kobo, Sony, Nook, or Kindle? I think that idea is a figment of marketers’ imagination. People are buying iPads for myriad reasons, 99% of which have nothing to do with being able to read the latest novel. I suspect that if all iPad purchasers were polled, less than 1% would say they buy more than 1 novel a year to read. The Apple iBookstore is insignificant except in that (1) it introduced agency pricing — thereby punishing everyone who does read — because Jobs doesn’t think anyone reads and therefore didn’t expect agency pricing to affect his customers and (2) it skews ebook data as first-time iPad buyers buy and/or download a book as a one-time experiment.