Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Rakuten runs a series of Amazon-like onlike shopping malls aggregating products from a variety of online stores along with their own subsidiaries. But not Kobo. Where Amazon takes every oppotunity to promote Kindle to their shoppers, Rakuten barely acknowledges Kobo exists, much less tries to send customers their way.
(Its been discussed at the EbookReader Blog and DigitalReader Blog.)
When Rakuten revamped and renamed Buy.com to Rakuten.com, a couple months back, I checked to see if Kobo was linked anywhere but it wasn't. Don't know if its changed but a search there for "ebooks" offered up at the top a print book on how to self-publish ebooks...for Kindle. On the hardware side they offered up a bunch of very old Ectaco readers and an out-of-stock pink Kobo reader from a third-party vendor.
Not a hint of integration or support for Kobo.com.
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I wondered if this is what fueled your speculation. My understanding is that Rakuten has a philosophy of not-competing with specialized third party sellers for on-line sales and that their strategy for Kobo is to partner with places like FNAC in France, Livraria Cultura in Brazil, WH Smith in the UK, etc.
Kobo, which Rakuten purchased for $315 million USD in 2011, does not sell directly except in Canada and recently after a hiatus, in the US, where it no longer has a major partner.
They are also in the process of transitioning buy.com to rakuten.com. It is definitely a work in progress. The Canadian site is terrible, though they do sell older models of Kobo devices on rakuten.com. I heard (and have no idea where at this point) that the fulfillment part outside of Japan was proving to be a challenge. The recent debacle with US fulfillment might be an example of that.
There is a video of Hiroshi Mikitani speaking at Kobo worth spending 11 minutes on.
http://cafe.kobo.com/blog/kobo-in-co...rket-place-3-0