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Walmart Teams Up With Kobo To Sell EBooks and Audiobooks (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Later this year, you'll be able to buy ebooks and audiobooks straight from Walmart's website. The big box retailer has teamed up with Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten to launch a business that can take on Amazon's Kindle offerings. Walmart will give its customers in the U.S. an easy way to access to Kobo's library -- Kobo is Rakuten's digital book division -- and its six million titles from tens of thousands of publishers. The company will also start selling Kobo eReaders, which will set you back at least $120, online and in stores sometime this year.
Walmart said Kobo's titles will be fully integrated into its website, so the ebook and audiobook versions of the title you're searching for will appear alongside the listing of its physical book. However, you won't be able to access the digital files through random apps. You'll have to use the co-branded apps for iOS, Android and desktop that Walmart and Kobo will release in the future, though you'll of course be able access ebooks through a Kobo e-reader.
I can buy stuff from other providers.... What a crock.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Hitler was a good man
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Walmart censors their media to appeal to Christian fundamentalists.
Even if you're not a Christian, you're still subjected to this without your knowledge or explicit consent. If you buy books or music at Walmart, you're getting the toned-down version for Christians.
No Amazon store access so I can access my Kindle library...no sale.
Walmart needs to become Amazon before Amazon can become Walmart.
Walmart trying to play lock-in games with a proprietary incompatible ebook format that only works with their hardware and software?
They don't know what they're doing any more. Their online presence is a collection of bad ideas poorly executed. I tried to do some of my Christmas shopping online at Walmart, and I kept coming back to Amazon because it was consistently easier to find what I was looking for and get it fast at a good price.
No way are they "at least $120"
Kobo is a customer of mine, and I have both a Touch and a top-line Aura one.
In 80-cent Canadian dollars the prices are:
Kobo Mini. $59.99
Kobo Touch. $99.99
Kobo Glo. $129.99
Kobo Glo HD. $129.99
Kobo Touch 2.0. $129.99
Kobo Aura. $149.99
Kobo Aura HD. $169.99
Kobo Aura H2O. $179.99
Expect cheaper in the 'States, and even cheaper at Wallmart.
davecb@spamcop.net
Go outside. What rednecks are they targeting in Los Angeles, Miami, and Long Island?
... empty space in that market.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Seems to me that working with Kobo is a half ass attempt to compete with Amazon. They should buy Barnes and Nobles and do their best to fight Amazon. I give it 2 years at most. At which time they'll announce that they are closing down their joint venture.
It's a shame since Walmart is really in the best position to take Amazon on. B & N is slowly dying and soon there won't be an option for Walmart to buy it and compete with Amazon's book business.
I know what the intent of that was. There will be DRM to limit the book to Kobo devices and apps, with perhaps their own bastardized format in place of epub or pdf, just like Amazon has their own format/DRM for Kindle.
If this takes off, I expect it will not be long before there is a Calibre plugin to deal with it. But, as I've been a Kobo customer in the past without a happy ending, I doubt I'll be looking for the plugin or care.
Kobo arguably puts out the best eReaders that can handle the most common open source ebook format: EPUB.
WalMart is a cesspool.
I hope it's possible to take advantage of this venture without actually going into a WalMart.
..l. but not from Wally-mart (whom I quite dislike, but don't attribute VidAngel to)
davecb@spamcop.net
Go outside. What rednecks are they targeting in Los Angeles, Miami, and Long Island?
Go outside. There are more than the feared and dreaded "coastal liberals" living on the coasts.
Now if the Kobo is compatible with my library systems eBook loan system, I may be interested. Oh and if I can install calibre client and Aldiko...
I'll never directly pay for an eBook, except through local taxes that go to the library....
I'm not a usual Walmart customer but I'll probably have a look at this because both Kindle and Audible have become a shit show lately. Kindle is a landfill of low quality blog posts turned into ebooks and now Amazon is injecting ads in homepages and menus of their customers devices to upsell and cross-sell shit.
lucm, indeed.
i.e. "Lead Balloon"? That about describes how well this is likely to go over.
I realized that the ebook market is completely locked into Amazon when I looked for certain ebooks and discovered that they are only available at Amazon, and not bn.com, for instance.
I presume that some authors/publishers (at least smaller ones) have determined that publishing on any other platform is just not worth the effort.
The only way this will change is with some antitrust action, or some other actual paradigm shift, not just the buzzword kind.
Only thing I'm concerned about is right of first sale. When I buy these E-books they're mine in perpetuity, accessible any time. Using a special app or device potentially can lock me out of my purchase if no longer supported, or available.
From having had several different Kobo models, mostly because I kept breaking old ones whose screen had a glass substrate, I'd say calling them Kobos "the best eReaders" doesn't mean much. The UI has gotten worse with time, in my opinion, and it's always been sluggish for every single device I've had. Something as simple as clicking on a number to go to a reference is painful. Most of the time, the touch is interpreted as a page turn instead, so you have to go back to the page you were reading and try again. If it works, you sometimes have to wait 15-20 second for the reference to open, and then you have to go through the same process to go back to the page you were on. It's just OK to use as long as you read nothing but fiction, which contains few or no references. The browser is unusable for anything but accepting the terms of service to connect to a WiFi network. Converting books to the Kindle format is a trivial operation in Calibre, so the ability to read EPUB is an extremely weak sales argument in my opinion. Last, I personally dislike how strongly the device is tied to the Kobo marketplace (I suppose Kindle has the same issue). I think the vast majority of owners of Kobo eReaders are unaware that they can read books from other sources (Google market, gutenberg.org, etc.).
Hopefully someday someone will release eReaders with good color screens, it might make the competition in that sector go up.