Kobo reporting unprecedented growth-yay!

[lecoeur]

http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/ko...ks-by-country/

May the growth continue!... or the force be with you...whatever.

[TonyToews]

Interesting but no hard numbers. That is Amazon said they sold over a million units per week in December. This story mentions doubling of sales and 500% increase. Well, going from selling one per week to five per week is 500% increase but not significant.

Don't get me wrong here. I love my Kobo products and such. It's just that this story has no real foundation to it.

[lecoeur]

Originally Posted by TonyToews

Interesting but no hard numbers. That is Amazon said they sold over a million units per week in December. This story mentions doubling of sales and 500% increase. Well, going from selling one per week to five per week is 500% increase but not significant.

Don't get me wrong here. I love my Kobo products and such. It's just that this story has no real foundation to it.

Hi Tony,

Amazon started this penchant for never ever revealing actual numbers and even the Dec Amz 'millions' was an approximation and no real hard breakdown of which model was actually selling. The rest of the industry has followed suit in the smoke & mirrors game-for which you can't really blame them. The only hard numbers avail for Kobo came out of France last week(you know the country-no Ebooks, ever, over my dead body, this is the end of civilisation, etc.lol)
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/kob...s-expectations
(for the link shy: they sold over 30,000 kobo touches in 2 weeks in Dec, more than they were expecting to sell in a year.)

[biscuitbear]

Originally Posted by lecoeur

The only hard numbers avail for Kobo came out of France last week(you know the country-no Ebooks, ever, over my dead body, this is the end of civilisation, etc.lol)

What what? I asked for a kobo for Christmas and am glad I did - much easier to carry around Parisian suburban trains than paper books. I already gave the sales pitch and did a demonstration to 3 colleagues at the coffee machine, and they all liked it.

Looks like a lot of us got a kobo for Christmas, the number of reviews at fnac.com increased suddenly over a few days.

[ArmorDog]

Mods, can we change the thread title to

Kobo reporting unprecedented growth thanks to biscuitbear - yay!

[Mememememe]

As long as you keep pumping out new readers, you'll see a rise in numbers, at least for a while. New readers means more gift items means more people buying content for their new readers. Kobo came out with two new readers this year -- Touch and Vox -- so they would have sold a fair bit of those, along with content, and boosted their.

But that's just revenues. Revenues are always positive, because they don't take into account how much you need to invest.

I'm not convinced this model works long term. Ideally, you put out a reader so that you can sell content for that reader. But Kindle, Kobo, Sony, etc. keep trying to one-up each other with new and inexpensive readers every six months, so these companies are investing a lot of money in hardware with low profit margins. As long as they do that, a company like Kobo will have trouble actually making money. (They were actually losing money prior to being sold by Indigo.)

[pokee]

Of course the Kobo app and eBook sales are going up - that's just a function of eReading on tablets and phones becoming more popular. Heck, the waitlists at my local online library are becoming longer, too.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Kobos - and I am happy that Kobo is reporting good news, but it's sort of inevitable, isn't it?

I doubt they're doing as well with device sales. I'd be more interested in a story on how many of Kobo devices were returned in relation to how many were purchased over the holidays! Now, that would be entertaining!