Kobos at Walmart

[rcentros]

I know this has been posted at the News forum, but I think it probably deserves a thread of its own in the Kobo Forum as well. This is big news. (Good news as far as I'm concerned.)

http://news.kobo.com/press/releases/...tegic-alliance

Rakuten Kobo U.S. eReading Service

As part of this alliance, Walmart will become Rakuten Kobo’s exclusive mass retail partner for the Kobo brand in the U.S., offering Kobo’s nearly six million titles from thousands of publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors to Walmart.com customers. Walmart.com will offer eBooks and audiobooks for sale later this year. Walmart will also sell digital book cards in stores, enabling more than 4,000 stores to carry a broader selection of books for customers.

All eBook content will be accessible through a Walmart/Kobo co-branded app available on all iOS and Android devices, a desktop app and Kobo e-Readers, which will also be sold at Walmart later this year.

“Walmart is one of the top retailers in the world and one of the largest booksellers in the U.S. Our strategy from day one has been to partner with the world’s best retailers, so that they can easily offer their customers the option of reading digitally. This informs the software and devices we create, the books and authors we promote, and also the partnerships we build,” said Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn. “For us, this is another great opportunity to serve book lovers at Walmart, those people who make reading an important part of their lives.”

[Cootey]

Walmart will also sell digital book cards in stores, enabling more than 4,000 stores to carry a broader selection of books for customers.

This part seems interesting. If I understand correctly, Walmart will feature small book cards in stores so that people can purchase digital codes to redeem, but because the book cards are small, Walmart will be able to stock a wider variety than they would otherwise with physical books.

The fact that a co-branded app will be available on iOS means that they are will to pay the Apple tax like Amazon already does with everything but books. This is a big announcement. There are no stores that I am aware of that sell books on iOS devices because of that %30 cut. I wonder if they've worked something out with Apple. Walmart is big enough to do it.

GameStop often generates special download codes for customers when they run out of the limited edition Pokémon cards that Nintendo offers from time to time. The actual cards have a rub-off spot to reveal a code to download the critter into the game, but the cashiers can run off as many codes as you'd like when no cards are available during the promo period. I wonder if Walmart will do the same. There's no reason to have individual book cards for each sale. Otherwise, you could run out of them, losing digital sales!

[HLS]

Well hells bells I started a thread on this too LOL

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by kcladyz

Well hells bells I started a thread on this too LOL

It's pretty big news. From no major retailer (just a couple small independent bookstores) to Walmart – that's a huge change.

(I didn't start this thread until I saw it in the news thread. I just thought there should have been something in the Kobo forum. Maybe I was wrong to do that.)

[John F]

My post from the other thread:

WooHoo!

Kobo Aura One, here I come.

[issybird]

Let's keep the comments to the thread in the News forum, please? It'll be more interesting in the long run. I'm going to close this.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=294231