Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Kobo is headquartered in Canada. Their ecosystem was developed based on Canadian law. Under Canadian privacy laws, if Kobo starts storing ebooks for their customers, they must allow the customers access to the information on their books stored by Kobo. You did notice that on some devices, Kobo allows the customer to store books in the customer's cloud (either DropBox or GoogleDrive)?
This discussion has been going on for over a decade. See this message from 2013. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act is still the guiding document in Canada. |
What I'm trying to say is that Kobo could ABSOLUTELY sync books that are not from their store if they wanted to...they just need to have a policy that follows the current law. No matter what you say,
if Amazon and Pocketbook weren't following Canadian (or EU) law, their products wouldn't be allowed to be sold there, so they must have figured out a way to do it.
Even if Kobo didn't want to have a cloud storage and syncing service like Amazon and Pocketbook do, they could certainly allow people to send 3rd party books directly to their devices over email or using an app. Just offering that service might bring some people over to them.
I think what you're missing is that nothing on Amazon is synced without consent. If you use the Send to Kindle app on a PC or on the web, you have the choice of whether or not to send the book to your Kindle Library, or just to a device. If you don't send it to the library, it's not synced to anything. If you choose to email your books, but don't want them archived in your library, you can turn off that feature and just send them to a particular device. You are not *forced* to store your personal files on Amazon's servers, even if you use Send to Kindle. Of course, the files won't sync if you do that, but some people aren't looking for that, they're just looking for a way to send the books to the device wirelessly. Kobo can't even do that natively.
They obviously don't want to...and that's fine. But it truly does limit their audience.
Shari