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posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 26 2018, @09:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the ebook-market-competition-at-last? dept.

Rakuten (the owner of Kobo) and Walmart have teamed up to take on the Amazon Kindle.

On Thursday Walmart and Rakuten announced a strategic partnership that makes Walmart Kobo's official partner here in the US:

As part of this alliance, Walmart will become Rakuten Kobo's exclusive mass retail partner for the Kobo brand in the U.S., offering Kobo's nearly six million titles from thousands of publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors to Walmart.com customers. Walmart.com will offer eBooks and audiobooks for sale later this year. Walmart will also sell digital book cards in stores, enabling more than 4,000 stores to carry a broader selection of books for customers.

All eBook content will be accessible through a Walmart/Kobo co-branded app available on all iOS and Android devices, a desktop app and Kobo e-Readers, which will also be sold at Walmart later this year.

Walmart is stepping into a role empty since Border went bankrupt in 2011. While Kobo has previously had US retail partners, including Indiebound and Family Christian Stores, they did not get the privilege of co-branded Kobo apps (just the financial benefit of a cut of ebook sales in exchange for selling Kobo hardware).

For what it is worth, Walmart gets the ebook app under its own brand. Given Kobo's negligible share of the US market, that won't be worth a lot of money, but it is at least an egoboost.


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 26 2018, @10:02PM (6 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday January 26 2018, @10:02PM (#628569)

    Give us affordable e-ink desktop monitors!
    I would totally set one up as secondary screen for datasheets/standards/mail, even in B&W.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM (#628589)

    I played with an arduino shield for e-ink and its interesting technology, but biggest problem with "real world" use is one million page refreshes is a reasonable lifespan for an ebook page reader, but its only about two years of stereotypical "update the server load stats display every minute"

    Also you're building something with a multi-second refresh rate that updates every minute means it'll be unreadable more than 1 or 2 percent of the time, which is kinda ridiculous.

    Finally updating more than once per second means I could afford the battery to run a e-ink display wireless but can't afford the wifi power at once/min. Maybe low power bluetooth would have worked. Anyway once you're tethered to power anyway, LCD technology is better across all categories.

    What it is good for is stuff that changes very rarely or very few times in its life, although I'm not sure what that would be so my e-ink display sits in my desk drawer. There was some weirdness with driving it that I don't remember the details of such that high res was possible but a PITA.

    I was kinda sorta in my infinite spare time thinking of implementing a "direct read" medium size e-ink moon phase clock. Hook up a cheap GPS to get live timestamps, the math isn't that complicated... A moon a couple inches across would be maybe 1000 pixels aka the image only changes at the border of light and dark by a couple pixels per day. The res would be high enough I could use a B+W pix of the moon with high res craters and stuff, could look pretty cool. Completely useless of course, other than looking cool. In my infinite spare time, LOL. Wouldn't be hard to do.

    If the tech could be perfected into near normal display technology, that would be cool. Or if you could buy huge e-ink displays even if expensive that would be cool. But, neither so far, so hard to find a use...

    E-ink is kinda like lasers in the 70s. Holy cow that is cool... what can I do with it? Nothing, you say? Oh well, but look how cool it is...

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 26 2018, @11:36PM (3 children)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday January 26 2018, @11:36PM (#628622) Homepage

      Working for Boston Dynamics, we investigated E-ink as kind of a side venture to make extra income after the buyout. We too came to the same conclusion, it's expensive for what it is and to goddamn slow to portray any kind of reasonable motion or animation. It's best suited to static displays, which can be done much more cheaply.

      However, a huge advantage is battery life. Think of the locking muscle used my molluscs to shut their clamshells -- once the muscle is locked shut, it takes no additional energy on behalf of the mollusc to stay shut. Because of this, some e-ink displays, when used statically or refreshed on an occasional basis, can maintain up to a year of display on one battery charge.

      Visionect is are the forefront of pushing the boundaries of E-ink, indeed, they are an official partner of E-ink displays. You can see a decent implementation in one of their "what if" marketing webpages. [visionect.com] You can get a dev kit at a discount, but there are only exchanges, never any refunds, and there are a lot of bugs which need to be ironed out of their software suite. The suite (basically a web 2.0 backend admin) is pretty snazzy, though, and offers easy tiling options. Communication with the device under the hood is good ol' serial and the software allows you access to manually enter commands in a terminal if you prefer to operate that way.

      It's not cheap. the 13" dev kit will run you 900 bucks including discount, the 36" does not come with a discount and will run you 4000 bucks.

      The real potential for E-ink exists in flexible displays. [eink.com] Imagine structures such as spheres or cones with E-ink displays of appropriate geometry tiled to the form. Anyway, as with all "new" tech, you're going to be charged out the ass to be an early adopter.

      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 26 2018, @11:47PM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday January 26 2018, @11:47PM (#628629) Homepage

        Also, in large parts America, bus stops are frequented by crackheads and other angry minorities who like to break shit. When Jamal gets kicked out of his White girlfriend's (who was dating a refugee because its' the "progressive" thing to do) house for beating her for the fifth time, he will have to turn to the bus stops and he will be angry enough to punch something expensive. Thanks to the cancer of progressivism, even affluent White neighborhoods will not be safe from this menace. And, as you recently saw in Philly, putting bulletproof glass around something is now "racist."

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:27AM (1 child)

        by bob_super (1357) on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:27AM (#628651)

        I read hundreds of pages of docs and articles every month. Tech stuff, no animations nor colors required (okay, occasionally colors do help)
        My eyes would really love a paper-like 20+ inch display (dual-page view really helps). My wallet doesn't agree with the 900 bucks per 13 inches.

  • (Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM

    by insanumingenium (4824) on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM (#628590) Journal

    As cheap as LCDs are, and without the benefit of battery life savings, I don't see it coming. Would make a bitching 80x24 though...