Border's Kobo e-Reader Goes On Sale

[hoosier]

FYI.....

Ann Arbor, Mich. - Borders today entered the e-book market with the rollout of the Kobo e-reader.
Border's Kobo e-Reaer
The company has begun taking pre-orders for the $149 Kobo at www.borders.com/koboreader, and it is expected to ship by June 17. The Kobo will come preloaded with 100 classic book titles. In addition, Borders will open its online e-book store next month with 1 million titles and apps designed for the Kobo.

The E Ink-based Kobo is 4.7 inches by 7.2 inches by 0.4 inches and weighs 8 ounces. It has 1GB of memory, capable of storing up to 1,000 titles. Borders said the Kobo will last two weeks on a single charge, enough power to read about 8,000 pages. It can connect to a PC via USB or Bluetooth and it supports EPUB, PDF and Adobe DRM.
Borders said it will sell additional e-readers in the future, and the titles available from the online store will support a wide variety of formats and can be downloaded onto portable devices like the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-based phones.
The Kobo is manufactured by Kobo Inc., of which Borders is a majority shareholder.

[chalimac]

Working link:

http://www.borders.com/online/store/...ew_koboereader

[EricLandes]

When you preorder, are they taking your cash up front or are they charging when they ship?

[juiceless]

Originally Posted by EricLandes

When you preorder, are they taking your cash up front or are they charging when they ship?

Why don't you ask them?

[peitsao]

Does this merger with Borders mean that Kobo will no longer sell ebooks outside the Borders website?

[SameerH]

Borders is using Kobo technology to power their ebook store. The Kobo store remains open and un-merged with anyone else

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by hoosier

Borders said it will sell additional e-readers in the future, and the titles available from the online store will support a wide variety of formats and can be downloaded onto portable devices like the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-based phones.

So far as I can tell, Borders ebook store capabilities are identical to those of the Kobo ebook store. What this means is that there are only two formats supported, a) ePub on some but not all ebooks, and b) a secret format that only works with Kobi reader software. It is possible that Borders will provide an ePub version of all its ebooks, but, like Kobo, they are trying to lock you into buying only from them by only supporting their own ebooks in their smartphone apps. Note that this is much more locked down than the Kindle and B&N apps, which at a minimum use known ebook formats and therefore are easier to hack for your own ebooks.

[taming]

I have to wonder though, since you can store on multiple devices, and download ePUB into ADE onto your desktop as well, how big a deal this is in reality. I know that using ADE on my desktop, I can load the files into Calibre and then upload them in various formats onto a wide variety of readers.

It took me awhile to figure out that ADE placed epub files into My Documents (windows) in the My Digital Edition folder.