Quote:
Originally Posted by guitarizt
I'll be surprised if Kobo is still around in 5 years. The competition in the ebook market is fierce, Amazon is the big player, and Kobo is only ahead right now because they are 6 months ahead of the next gen ereader curve.
The competition in the market is too great for Kobo to survive with such horrible customer service and shipping times for the Aura HD. US customers can't even buy an Aura HD in a B&M store yet which looks very unprofessional. A lot of us are only paying for the Aura HD because it is slightly ahead of the next gen curve. Technology will move so fast in the next 5 years that ereaders will be largely satisfactory for most people. Then it'll come down to how easy it is to purchase ebooks and customer service.
Amazon has both those areas covered and it's not even close. There's no reason to think that Kobo will change. If anything I would expect it to get worse because they'll have to deal with more orders and problems than with whatever they put out in the future than what they did with the Aura HD.
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Again, Kobo can be a much more viable option than anywhere in the world that isn't the United States of America. Kobo is a much better option than Amazon even here in Canada.
I think it will all come down to the quality of the store in the long term. Amazon's store is good, but the selection is limited in non-U.S. regions. Kobo's selection is quite good in many non-U.S. regions, but the store...well it could use work.
In a sense, I think it'd be easier for Amazon to expand their international content selection than for Kobo to build a better store (several aspects of coding doesn't seem to be Kobo's strongest suit), but if Kobo was willing to throw a bunch of money at the problem, it could easily be fixed.
But that's all I'll say; I've had my Kobo Glo since October and haven't had a single reason to complian (other than the odd non-critical firmware bug), so I'll show myself out the back door.