Morning Coffee – 16 December 2015

23692302141_509ee25310_bHere are seven stories to read this morning.

  1. A Love Letter to College Libraries (Book Riot)
  2. Amicus Briefs Support Apple's Supreme Court Bid (PW)
  3. Books vs. e-books: The science behind the best way to read (CBS News)
  4. DRM state of digital comics (winter 2015-2016) (Anthony's Notes)
  5. Kobo International E-Book Store Launches: Why Amazon Should Be Afraid (WIRED)
  6. The Myth of the Everyreader (Jane Friedman)
  7. Ten Reasons Authors Aren't Retaking Their Copyrights (BillboardThe Passive Voice)

image by ezhikoff

About Nate Hoffelder (11470 Articles)
Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader: "I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

5 Comments on Morning Coffee – 16 December 2015

  1. It’s cruel and heartless running these old posts. You had me fixing a fresh coffee and I was several paragraphs in before I realised that WIRED piece was not some major revamp from Kobo. 🙂

  2. The Wired piece is a nice bit of history.
    It highlights how much hope people had for Kobo as an anti-Amazon…
    …and how little has resulted from its core strategy of letting local partners do the heavy lifting. Since 2009 we’ve learned that competition by proxy may be a cheap way to play globally but we’ve also seen that its results are limited and inconsistent.

    Clearly, a truly global player has to be active on the ground themselves to be most effective (ala Apple, Google, and Amazon).

  3. I think I got halfway through the article about Kobo before I realized why it seemed so weird and looked at the date.
    I admit I’m slow, but I guess I’m used to expecting news from these links 🙂

  4. While it may be quite funny as seen from the US of A, Kobo is quite a big player here in other states. In France, AFAIK, Kobo gets roughly the same share as Apple, not THAT far from Amazon (something like 40% Amazon, 25 for Apple and 25 for Kobo, the rest being “indies”/”Local”)

  5. Kobo is biggest in the smallest markets and it can be argued that their relevance is inversely proportional to the size of the market.

    France comprises 4% of the world book market, roughly the size of the UK. But ebook penetration in France has been reported to be in the 3-5% range versus 17-20% in the UK so 25% market share in France is the same amount of sales as 5% in the UK and 1-2% in the US.

    I would suggest that the biggest threat to Kobo isn’t Amazon but rather Tolino. Kobo’s business model relies on local partners willing to outsource digital sales to Kobo (much like Borders US outsourced online pbooks sales to Amazon back in the day). The Tolino alliance is built on the idea that ebooks are too important a segment to outsource and that it is better to build their own solution. And keep all the revenue from that segment. They seem to be having enough success to be locally relevant.

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