Kobo Vox tablets are shown in a handout photo. It's sells for about $200 and shipping starts on Oct. 28, 2011.The Canadian Press
Toronto-based Kobo is quickening its pace in the contest to capture the emerging global market for e-book sales and service, having matched U.S. rival and market leader Amazon.com by announcing its own low-cost tablet reader earlier this month and, this week, unveiling plans to publish new titles under its own imprint.
Competing with traditional publishers to develop new titles is essential for a company that strives to be a global player in the e-reading market, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis told CBC news. "It's table stakes – you have to provide it," he said.
Amazon first announced its publishing program two years ago and issued more than 120 titles in a variety of genres this fall. Aggressively courting such well-known figures as Timothy Ferriss and Penny Marshall, the Seattle-based company has spread alarm among traditional publishers, according to The New York Times.
"The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti told the paper.
Kobo's decision to enter into competition with its own suppliers further complicates relations already strained by the decision of its part-owner, Indigo Books and Music, to promote Kobo e-readers aggressively in stores formerly dedicated exclusively to selling traditional books.
Thousands of bookstores across North America have closed in the course of the digital revolution, falling prey first to online book sales and more recently to e-books that can be delivered automatically to such devices as the Kobo and Amazon's market-leading Kindle. Some fear that traditional publishers will be the next to suffer as online operators move onto their turf.
But Writers' Union of Canada chair Greg Hollingshead welcomed the news, saying the new competition could encourage traditional publishers to pay more for electronic rights and to stop forcing authors to do "what publishers are supposed to do – editing and promotion."
Traditional publishers generally remit 25 per cent of a book's cover price as a royalty to authors, while Amazon pays as much as 70 per cent, according to Hollingshead. If the new e-publishers make good on their promise, he added, "conventional publishers will need to look hard at how they treat authors and how they compete in the digital market."
Kobo is promising to emulate Amazon by offering full publishing services to new author-clients at discounted prices and allowing them to keep a greater share of proceeds from sales. The program will launch next year, according to Serbinis.
In the meantime, the company is rushing to market with its own low-cost tablet computer, called Vox, to compete with Amazon's recently announced Fire tablet. Based on the popular Android operating system, the $199 device goes on sale in Canada next week.
In its aggressive bid to beat Amazon in foreign markets, Kobo also recently joined British book chain WH Smith and French chain Fnac as exclusive partner to both companies as they expand into e-reading.
Kobo currently boasts of having five million subscribers accessing an online inventory of 2.5 million titles, and was one of the first online retailers to offer applications allowing users of a variety of different reading devices to browse its catalogue and buy books.