Kobo, the e-reader and tablet company owned by Rakuten (aka Japan’s answer to Amazon), is today taking the covers off four new devices — three new Android-based Arc tablets and a new Aura e-reader. And it is using the occasion to kick off a redoubled effort to focus on a specific segment in the market — die-hard bookworms — to help itself gain an edge over Amazon and differentiate itself better in the market. Now, in addition to its catalogue of 4 million books, Kobo has built in integrations with Pocket, new reading-focused storefronts (starting with a store for children’s books and one for magazines), and two new Android feautures, a launcher Kobo calls “Reading Life” and a new Reading Mode, both designed to put reading front and center on tablets more than it has ever been done on tablets before.
“As Netflix is to video and Starbucks is to coffee, we want Kobo to be the name people think of for reading,” CEO Michael Serbinis said in an interview.
Aura E-Reader. Despite analyst speculation that e-readers are dying, they continue to be an important route to tapping dedicated customers, Serbinis tells me. “In the U.S. specifically there has been a slowdown in e-reader sales but for those who buy them we see very high purchase intent.”
And Serbinis notes that even if it sounds limiting to focus only on a small and shrinking segment of the market that are avid readers, so far this has actually paid off well in its e-reader lineup. When the company launched its limited edition, power-reader-friendly Aura HD e-reader earlier this year, sales expectations were not very high. “We thought that they would be one to four percent of sales,” he said. “The quickly became a quarter.”
If the existing Aura HD was an attempt to recreate some of the aesthetics of a hardback book experience, the new 6″ Aura launching today, Serbinis says, takes its cues from the world of tablets, with an edge-to-edge display, and at a thickness of 8mm and weight of 174g, a thinner and lighter body. Like the HD it is front-lit but without as high-resolution a screen.
New Arc tablets. Sebinis says that the three new tablets — 7″, 7″HD and 10″HD models, going on sale in October — are all multipurpose Android devices, running Jelly Bean and full of all the specs you would expect in devices like this. But like the Aura e-readers, they are built with a very specific intention in mind: targeting those who buy these devices to consume books, magazines and other reading materials. “We think there is a space for us. No tablet has really been designed for readers,” he notes.
Kobo came to this conclusion, he says, by canvassing users. “We have a lot of data from users around the world and those who download apps on our tablets read for minutes, not hours. They read once a week versus daily.” So Kobo asked its top 10,000 customers, why don’t the read on tablets? The answer, he says, was that it was too distracting. Too many alerts and other things happening on the screen, and “also they are generally too hard on the eyes, and weight is a problem. Basically, it’s pretty obvious tablets up to now have been multipurpose first and reading second.”
So Kobo decided to concentrate on these points. The screens on the HD devices, he says, are “better than Apple’s Retina display,” at up to 2560
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