Kobo touts holiday ereading success

By Geoff Duncan December 28, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Amazon.com might be trumpeting its Kindle device as its best-selling and most-gifted item ever, but it’s not the only player in the ereader market. Kobo wants folks to know that its ereading ecosystem has had a banner end-of-year season as well, with downloads from its eBook store at the highest level ever, over a million people connecting to Kobo, and “hundreds of thousands” of devices being activated each day since Christmas Eve—although, like Amazon, Kobo isn’t giving out any exact sales numbers.

“Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve,” said Kobo CE Michael Serbinis, in a statement. “I would like to thank our customers for choosing Kobo to start building their digital library this Christmas. Our success this holiday season is a pre-cursor to a New Year with people reading more than ever thanks to ebooks and Kobo.”

The Kobo ecosystem consists of dedicated readers with E-Ink displays (available from Kobo and Borders), as well as desktop and mobile applications for Macs and PCS, along with iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm mobile devices. Kobo also claims to have one of the largest ebook stores, with over 2.2 million book, magazines, and newspaper titles available.

According to Kobo, holiday activity from customers has been notable for its international character, with customers connecting from more than 130 countries: big international gains from Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore, in addition to many English-speaking and Commonwealth countries. Kobo says they’re also seeing a healthy mix of devices, with ereaders and tablets counting for the largest portion of sales. Overall, Kobo says sales are 50 times higher this year than last year. Kobo is also the first ebook service to launch an ebook gifting and goft card program that delivered ebooks to recipients’ email accounts on Christmas morning.

Oh, and the most popular purchased and gifted books for Kobo this season? Those lists were dominated by Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, with Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol taking third place in the U.S. market and Emma Donahue’s Room coming in as the third most-gifted book for the season.

Topics

Emerging Tech

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.