[anavin]

Another thought about Japanese Kobo.

In addition to the Kobo account in rakuten.kobobooks.com glitch (showing that they're reluctant on merging), here are their recent movements:

* they created a new Andorid Kobo application while declaring the old one "deprecated," only in Japanese:

Spoiler:

楽天Kobo：旧バージョン
■はじめて楽天Koboをご利用になるお客様へ
本アプリは旧バージョンです。
これからご利用になるには、最新アプリをご利用ください。

* on rakuten.kobobooks.com, they put a notice to encourage you go to their "new" site, books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/, to have better campaigns:

Spoiler:

本サイトからは、一部を除き新ストア「楽天Kobo電子書籍ストア powered by 楽天ブックス」へとリンクいたします。
限定キャンペーンなどでお得に電子書籍をご購入いただける新ストアをご利用ください。

* the books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/ once had a link to rakuten.kobobooks.com for every books, to make you able to use coupon codes easier:

Spoiler:

Archived
kobo専用クーポンコードをお持ちの方はこちらのサイトよりご購入ください。

then the link became "to the old website":

Spoiler:

Archived
旧サイトはこちら

and now the link is completely disappeared.

* the coupons they gave away for Japanese users are less coupon codes (for kobobooks.com) while more RaCoupons (tied with one's Rakuten ID and only usable on books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/)

So IMO, it seems like Rakuten is trying to separate their Japanese Kobo users from the other countries in the world.