There is little doubt that electronic books have gone mainstream. The question now is, in just which direction will the market go? It’s possible that the Kindle will do what Apple and the iPod did for music, essentially owning the market. Or things could split open, with many sellers competing on an open platform. Kobo is betting on the latter.
Kobo is a rebranded Shortcovers, which sells e-books that can be read on almost any device, from Macs and PCs to the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre and any e-reader that can work with EPUB-format books, such as the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Sony Reader. Notably, the Kindle is absent from the list.
Shortcovers has been selling e-books for a while, but the rebranding to Kobo marks the first serious alternative to the Kindle as a platform. Kobo has teamed up with Borders, REDgroup Retail and Instant Fame, which to you and me means that the books are available almost worldwide, in the United States, Canada, the EU, the U.K., Australia and the Asia Pacific region. In fact, Borders will be incorporating Kobo into its store later next year. Kobo is also adding 1.8 million public-domain books from the Internet Archive.
To accompany the launch, there are a slew of new applications. I tried out the new iPhone app, which is, like the Shortcovers app before it, free. You log in with your existing Shortcovers ID and from there you can browse, sample and buy books.
Apart from a name change, Kobo has some new features. Now you can browse by category, choose from a new Top-50 e-books list, New York Times bestsellers, Oprah’s book-club picks and more. The app also has recommended reading lists (right now there is a “Season’s Readings” section, and a splendid “Canadian, eh” list) and a better search function.
It’s very easy to browse, and the Kobo app puts Amazon’s rushed-out Kindle for iPhone application to shame. It’s all done with full artwork for covers, and usually you can read the first chapter of a book (although a lot of the time, you only get to read the end-matter and not any actual content). Reading books is equally elegant, and greatly cleaned-up since the original Shortcovers app. Page turning is animated and actually looks like paper pages flipping.
But when you come to make a purchase, things go slightly awry. By now, most of us are used to in-app purchases on the iPhone, so getting bounced out of Kobo and tossed into a credit card form in Safari is an annoying shock. Once you have laboriously input your details, you are sent back to the Kobo app where your book is waiting for you. It would be more convenient if Kobo took advantage of the iTunes App Store’s ability to complete purchases within the app, with billing handled by Apple.
Subsequent transactions go smoother, and you only need to input your password to buy (it still requires a round-trip to Safari, though).
This reliance on Safari is, we assume, both a way to get around Apple’s 30 percent cut and also to make the experience the same across platforms. And speaking of platforms, only the iPhone and Blackberry have the updated applications so far, with the rest “coming soon.”
Kobo is so far the best and most comprehensive service we have used to buy and read books, especially for non-U.S. residents. It is still flawed, and it is a royal pain that Kindle won’t support EPUB books. But with its platform-agnostic approach, huge catalog and new heavyweight partners, we expect to see Kobo grow fast.
In fact, I’m pretty certain that my next e-book reader will not be a Kindle.
World, Meet Kobo! [Kobo blog]
Kobo Product page [Kobo]
Kobo for iPhone [iTunes]
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