Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
Yeah, but from about 2012 or 2013 when Best Buy quit selling them, until about 2018 when Walmart started selling them, Kobos were mostly imported from Canada, or found at a handful of independent U.S. booksellers, or sold on the gray market in the U.S. This is not what you would really call a U.S. "presence." You had to have the "drive" to actually find a Kobo if you wanted to buy one.
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Well, not quite.
Kobo signed up the *entire* ABA membership to sell Kobos and Kobo ebooks in that same time period:
https://the-digital-reader.com/2012/...ld%20sign%20up.
They had a website pointing out local partners so it wasn't hit or miss.
They also signed a few prominent non-ABA booksellers like Powell's, as noted above. The partnership was a big enough splash that Amazon felt a need to respond with AMAZON SOURCE, which was open to bookstores *and* non-bookstore retailers:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/ho...Earn-10-Future
The kneejerk reaction from most bookstores was "Kindle no" because they had Kobo:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...g-kindles.html
Quote:
Independent booksellers who want to sell e-books have been able to sell Kobo devices and e-books for the past year. "We haven't become online Amazon affiliates, because we sell books ourselves," says Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz. "We won't become in-store Kindle affiliates for the same reason—we also sell e-readers and e-books. Plus, we've long been outspoken supporters of e-fairness initiatives, which, despite recently public posturing, Amazon has rigorously opposed."
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It's not that Kobo doesn't *want* to sell into the US, they've run through a long list of partners--Borders, Best Buy, Target, THE ABA, Walmart. (Pretty much everbody except Rakuten.) They run their readers through FCC certification, after all. They *want* to sell in the US and have never stopped wanting to sell.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-t...76A4LJ20110711
It is that the US is a big, spread-out market, Kindle is dug in, and Amazon *competes*, matching competitors' moves and more, trying new things all the time, liie KIBDOE WORLDS and Kindle shorts.
Also, people tend to underestimate the impact of Kindle Unlimited; which has been skimming off a good chunk of the most avid readers since 2014. Yes, it's been that long.
Their author payouts are running around $400m and average around $2 per full read, so KU is siphoning off something like 200million reads from the retail market. If those were sales, those would be something north of $600M in sales or about a quarter of reported sales lost and turned rentals. There's also Prime Reads and the monthly Kindle free books. Those mostly APub, Indie, and small press, but reads are reads. All on Kindle.
And none of those existed, or mattered, in 2010.
The 2020 ereader market is very different from 2014 to say nothing of 2010.