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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.
No Amazon store access so I can access my Kindle library...no sale.
Walmart needs to become Amazon before Amazon can become Walmart.
You are wrong again, Oh Anonymous FUD Purveyor. Whereas it is true that Walmart was instrumental in getting media distributors to produce (*and clearly label as such*) "clean" versions of CDs/DVDs/Downloads/Whatever Else, absolutely no label or studio or artist is going to let them or anyone else pass off an edited/cleaned up edition as anything but that. Some artists refuse to produce "clean" versions of their work, and they're not sold through Walmart.
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
... 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.
There have, in fact, been lawsuits over such things being done without permission, and copyright holders have won pretty consistently.
Kobo isn't proprietary - it's compatible with all common ebook formats (unlike the Kindle).
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
I know all about VidAngels (the company referenced in your link). What's this got to do with Walmart? Again, Walmart doesn't censor. It's so big, it doesn't have to. It tells the artist "We won't sell your stuff unless you provide us with a (clearly marked) clean version," and 9 times out of 10 the artists capitulate because: Money.
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....
So your saying that vidangel is owned by walmart?
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.
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.