Booksellers club calls in Kobo to aid indies
Small shops to get e-stores
Britain's Booksellers Association (BA) has hopped into bed with Japanese-owned Canadian e-book company Kobo in a bid to help the UK's independent bookshops fight back against Amazon.
Kobo already operates in the UK through a partnership with newsagent WH Smith. The deal with the BA will allow the trade organisation's 3000-odd members, a third of who are indies, to present Kobo's e-book store as their own. They will be able to sell e-books directly to their customers online, sharing sales revenue with Kobo.
BA members' share of the proceeds of each sale was not disclosed.
Still, it comes at a time when booksellers, independent ones in particular, are struggling. While e-book sales are rocketing, physical sales are down, the Publishers Association revealed today. Digital offerings have a long way to go to match the revenue generated by sales of dead tree books, but it's never been harder for small shops to compete with bulk-buying, discount-driven rivals like Amazon.
In August, Kobo struck up a similar deal with the American Booksellers Association, which numbers 2000 independent sellers among its members.
Kobo sells e-books in the ePub format. In addition to its own shopfront, it operates branded online bookshops on behalf of 14,000 booksellers in 12 countries, it claimed. ®
COMMENTS
Re: If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash
Sorry, can't agree with that. Bought a Kobo Touch in March, after trying all three models on display in WH Smith.
Very pleased with the battery life, which does appear to be a week between charges, and page turns seem to take 0.5s.
Think I've spotted live ones in Currys as well. A small point, Kobo have promised, in writing, that they will NOT do an Amazon, once you've bought something, it stays bought, even if they have screwed up.
Whilst it does appear everything is going digital you would have thought there could still be a way for physical booksellers to remain relevant.
For one thing you can't wrap up an e-book and leave it under a Christmas tree.
Physical bookstores could just have a bunch of e-book readers about the store that people could preview books on. - put a couple of ebook readers at the end of each row with ebooks of all the physical books in that row preloaded. (chained to the shelf to stop people walking off with it of course!)
If you want to buy an e-book they just sell you a scratchcard with the book cover picture & a code to download the e-book.
Easy!
Kobo Wireless Ereadr
Being a Skinflint I bought a basic Kobo wireless ereader off ebay £20!
Page turns~ 1- 1.5 seconds
Reads off SD card
Battery lasts all week [and I read a lot.]
Does what i need it to do, epubs and PDF
Hidden casino game [menu>settings>advanced>menu
It runs on linux and you can boot from an external SD if you want
My only gripes are:
Can only sync kobo books across devices not my existing epubs
No newpapers or rss feeds available in the UK kobo store
can't change the web settings. or view email.
Re: If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash
The new ones very recently announced have apparently addressed this issue. Tempted by them but would like to have a hands on test to verify.
Tax
It doesn't help that the poor old independent book seller has to pay a decent rate of tax either.
