Kobo has some interesting plans. Here are a couple of snippets from Good eReader. Their Michael Koz interviewed Kobo’s Michael Serbinis at BEA:
Kobo has big plans for 2011 with the advent of their new eBook lending program! eBook lending is a way that you can lend books to friends for up to 14 days normally only 1 time. Two other companies right now offer ebook lending programs such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These two companies offer lending on select ebooks. Kobo although has not divulged all of their plans yet for the lending program said this is something they are working on and will implement by the end of the year.
Kobo also has plans for an independent author portal where authors can have their books listed in epub formats to be sold in the Kobo eBook store. This new program is comparable to rival programs such as Barnes and Noble PUBIT and the Amazon DTP. Kobo will be adding a new section to their book store for the titles that are self-published and will offer a conversion program for TXT, RTF and DOC files to EPUB. I can foresee Kobo having a revenue sharing policy comparable to the other companies.
More in the article, including a video interview.
The idea of lending a book for a set period is a great idea, a very smart business move too. It will take a group like Kobo to start it, and the rest will follow.
I think it will be a savvy move for them to do ebook lending, Kobo is a forward thinking young company. They seem to be expanding in all of the right ways and keep getting Class C funding from their existing partners to do interesting things. I see them doing the book lending by the end of the year since the CEO straight up said it. Hopefully I can get a demo of it before it goes live.
I’m looking forward to a place authors can publish their eBooks in ePub that is NOT Smashwords. I’d much rather the more hand crafted approach then the meatgrinder from Word that Smashwords uses. It’s awful and I don’t buy there because of it.