re: dictionaries.
If the kobo would provide a standard format for its dictionaries,
it would save kobo the trouble of trying to serve so many combinations or else it would open up the possibility of localized dictionaries made by people who need them anyway, earning those people who made them a bit of extra money that kobo would get a piece of.
A czech working in italy might want an italian-czech dictionary as he learns italian and reads it. He might want the reverse lookup when he reads comfortable czech text and wonders "how might I say this in italian".
A russian dealing with germans might use it to read german commerce laws and tourism websites. So, Russian-German and reverse lookup. That's yet another dictionary that english readers who at most thought they might like a spanish-english or french-english for their occasional encounters with those languages (or their frequent reading), never would buy. And it's monolingual anglophones who are by far the biggest single, uniform customer base for ebooks at this time, especially on devices.
The possibilities are endless. Is kobo going to try and "serve" those populations themselves just bc they would lose control if they opened up a standard?
Kobo could provide an amazon style server format conversion and keep the on device file/program encrypted. Dictionary authors could submit in any acceptable format and kobo would convert the book for sale and use on the device as an app, on their corporate servers. This would be economically viable. But I'd never buy it like that.
The question is how many customers are willing to pay for dictionaries and how many want "moar dictionaries" so that buying several is not in their economic interest (paying 10 bucks for a dictionary b/c you want to "learn spanish" or "learn english as a second language" is a lot different from paying for each of a czech-italian and czech german for business, a czech french for reading learning and a czech-russian for your friend to use. 40 bucks for a bunch of software dictionaries sure "feels" like a rip off compared to free computer solutions, even if it isn't a rip off).
That will determine what kobo puts on their device.
But like I said before, the more useful and open the platform is, the more of those hard-to-sell-to people (like me) you draw in and hence the more people will eventually buy from the kobo store just due to convenience.
Not everyone is a die hard reader of romance or horror, looking to dump their cash on massive series from various trashy authors. But those who aren't may eventually come around to buying ebooks, just bc the device is already in their hands. Although kobo's market research may prove otherwise.
The main dilemma for something like this for kobo is that they don't sell the device mainly for itself, like the high priced but very high function onyx boox (which has full featured and free "everything": browser, games, open dictionary format you can load yourself, etc, etc. They have no online bookstore and so the only money they make is from the device, which is therefore higher priced...and can be higher priced bc it's superior to the rest
.
Kobo sell it like amazon and BN (and to an strange extent, like the considerably higher priced sony), to sell books on their web store, at a lower device price to draw you into that online business. But you
might not go ape buying books from them and just use your own pdfs and texts for free. And so they have to hedge their bets, by not selling it to you for 10 bucks under the assumption that enough people will spend five hundred or a thousand bucks to offset the 10 buck crowd that'll just read free comics, free erotica, gutenberg.org free dickens and saved wikipedia pages.