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.
(Score: 1, Funny) by VLM on Friday January 26 2018, @09:21PM (8 children)
I've shopped at Walmart occasionally. Its a trip, alright. Just asking, can anyone in the "walmart demographic" read English language books? I'm just not seeing it.
Just sayin they selected a very peculiar demographic to sell to. For example, during a hurricane or race riot you don't want to be the owner of a retail store selling big screen TVs, athletic shoes, or booze, but lets just say the bookstores usually don't get looted too badly by the typical walmart shopper demographic.
I haven't seen many TV stories of store windows smashed by rioters hauling crates of T.S. Elliot or Yeats on their shoulders, and when I look at the local walmart demographic the last thing that comes to mind is "literate". Definitely the kind of demographic you'd have much better luck daring them to eat pods of Tide detergent, not daring them to read Vladimir Nabokov. You'd have much better luck pushing the Tide.
Its a very strange move.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:43PM (2 children)
What!? What is this vision...!? It's...! I can see the future of your ass. I'm the Assteller.
You're at home, about to miscarriage. However, this is no ordinary baby: this is a feces baby! You run to the bathroom, fill up the bathtub, and shoot the feces baby out of your asshole at speeds you previously deemed impossible. What shot out of your asshole was a hunk of feces with something that looked to be a baby face at one end. The feces baby began crying.
It's mocking you. It's sneering at you. That piece of trash is maliciously trying to disrupt your peaceful life. Can you allow such an injustice to unfold before you? No. You will snuff out the feces baby's life until nothing remains! You grab a nearby pair of scissors and stab the feces baby countless times, tearing it apart piece by piece! "Drown in strut!" you scream. Finally, silence descended upon this place. In celebration of your glorious victory, you began doing a snap dance. Suddenly, words were printed in the air in front of you. They read, "A WIND TURBINE IS BROKEN. DO E E." Your vision then turns pitch black and you feel yourself being transported to another location.
You seem to be lying in your bed, and the room is filled with darkness. You notice that something like a child's toy is under your back, and that it is a malevolent entity. A vision of Morgan Freeman's face appeared at the forefront of your mind, and you heard someone who sounded eerily like him ask, "If I may ask, what power does this place output?" The toy being crushed under your back replies, "Oh, you know... wind-powered, solar-powered, nuclear-powered, tickle!"
You knew. You knew that something disastrous was about to occur, but could not comprehend what it was. You tried to move, but found that not a single cheek on your body was capable of movement. Then, your body suddenly started spinning around at the speed of light on the bed, as if it had become the hand of a clock. Meanwhile, the children's toy under your back began rapidly vibrating and moving towards your most snappy of holes. Once the toy slipped into your undies and reached your snappyhole, it began screaming and making a "VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV" sound. No! It tickles! Your ass... it tickles horribly! No! Stop! Please! But no matter how much you scream, the tickle continues mercilessly. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 26 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
Exactly what I mean, that fine literature wouldn't sell at Walmart. Probably because its in English ... uh, I think its in English.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 26 2018, @11:05PM
Truly enormous tickle. Or was it tingle [wikipedia.org]?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)
Anyone else hear a whistling sound? My dog is going crazy
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 26 2018, @10:08PM
Its just good product marketing, err lack thereof. You wouldn't expect much business success if you inked a deal to sell top quality beef tenderloin steaks at the local vegetarian grocery or a distributorship of said beef steaks to the local Indian restaurant chain.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday January 26 2018, @09:50PM
Aha, but ebooks won't be vulnerable to shoplifting. So the cops won't need to stop by more frequently than their current rate of every day.
http://www.wbng.com/story/37342659/jcpd-called-458-times-to-johnson-city-walmart-last-year [wbng.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by insanumingenium on Friday January 26 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)
Walmart is the only gun store I have ever bought a novel at. That is they point, they sell everything, and with their own brand attached when possible. I know plenty of people that get a large portion of their electronics at Walmart. And if you want to sell retail electronics in this country, Walmart is one of the outlets you work hardest to get/keep. Not sure why lootability features so highly in your response.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday January 26 2018, @11:29PM
I figured he was just pointing out that physical stores are more vulnerable to crowdfaults. It's my understanding Walmarts tend to be placed mostly in lower-income neighborhoods, where looting is more likely to happen. The Walmarts where I've lived have been pretty good though; nothing like People of Walmart. The worst I've seen is the occasional panhandler with sign standing near the parking lot exit.
However, I did go to one in northern California that had a lot of seedy people around, and I thought it was closed at first because the sign and all the lights were off at the side entry point of the parking lot. I kept expecting to find needles lying around but I was pleasantly disappointed to not come across any.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by richtopia on Friday January 26 2018, @09:28PM (1 child)
I've owned a Nook Glo and currently own a Kobo Aura. Between the two the Kobo is the superior experience. Kobo runs Linux, and while you cannot tell, the battery life is far superior to the Android powered Nook, especially in standby time (the Nook was always out of battery from sitting idle, while the Kobo only needs to be charged from actual usage). Loading books is just copying epub files onto the internal memory, and Kobo is a large enough company that most digital libraries support Kobo ereaders.
Moral of the story, I don't have an opinion about the linked article, but if you are in the market for an eink reader I advise something from Kobo's product line.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @09:49PM
Anecdotal to be sure, but my old hardy Nook Simple Touches still soundly trounce my Kobo Aura One in battery life.
The Kobo Aura One experience is pretty much otherwise a night and day improvement - but not in the battery life department.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday January 26 2018, @09:37PM (7 children)
Give us color e-ink!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 26 2018, @10:02PM (6 children)
Give us affordable e-ink desktop monitors!
I would totally set one up as secondary screen for datasheets/standards/mail, even in B&W.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM (4 children)
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)
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
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)
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: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 27 2018, @01:31AM
Your wallet doesn't mean shit if it's you who aren't paying for the R&D.
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Friday January 26 2018, @10:28PM
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...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 26 2018, @10:10PM
-s.
And yes it's a Pain In The Ass sometimes, when it would be so easy to shop at Walmart.
I've been boycotting Walmart ever since they prevailed as the respondent in a sex discrimination lawsuit brought by its female employees.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2018, @10:25PM
Amazon Kindle - or rather Swindle - remotely deleted copies of no less than Orwell's 1984 from their users devices. Yes they really did, you can't make this shit up...
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle [defectivebydesign.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Apparition on Friday January 26 2018, @11:58PM
Amazon Kindle has a near total dominance in the eBook and eReader market in the United States, so any competition is good. The main problem though is that because of Amazon Kindle's near total dominance of the eBook market in the U.S., most publishers and authors simply don't bother with the other eBook sellers, making Amazon Kindle the sole outlet for their work. Last time I checked, only about two thirds of the eBooks in my Amazon Kindle library are available on Kobo. Even less on Google Play Books.
As for Walmart, they seem to have finally realized how badly Amazon.com is kicking their butts in the digital retail space and are trying to improve there. Walmart maintains Jet.com as a "high end" digital retailer for "urban millennials," and are working to improve their VUDU digital movie shop. Now they're moving into the eBook and eReader business by partnering with Rakuten's Kobo. I have no love for Walmart, but I hope the strategy works for them as Amazon seriously needs the competition to keep them even slightly honest.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:34AM
Walmart is effectively the welfare EBT service center for the US government. I'm not making a joke. Walmart is where your tax money ends up after it passes through the government ration cards and government-issued child support "credit cards" (male reproduction privilege tax cards). I guess it's good they are making more reading material available to these people... I don't know though. I think that battle is lost.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday January 29 2018, @05:39PM (2 children)
In the early adopter department, I had a Sony Reader before Amazon started making Kindles.
In the early-early adopter department, I was reading ebooks on Windows Tablet PC's and HP Jornada pocket PC's before eInk.
Today I have a Nook non-glowing version. My wife has a Kindle.
The thing I've learned is... I love having the convenience of having 200+ books in the palm of my hand. I'm a re-reader and a re-re-reader.
But I've also learned to plan for what I do when the ecosystem falls apart. So, as much as I respect Kobo, and I do, I don't think I'll take advantage until I'm sure they'll be around awhile.
Now if we could finally blow away DRM as happened with MP3's.... different story.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by etherscythe on Monday January 29 2018, @09:53PM (1 child)
In that case, Kobo might be a better bet than hanging onto your Nook, actually, since as I mentioned elsewhere [soylentnews.org], Barnes and Noble is basically giving up on the ebook space.
I've heard encouraging noises about a desktop app called Calibre and getting your ebooks out of jail. Here's hoping that all works out before the whole Nook store goes under. I'm guessing the division might sell off to somebody and your books *might* transfer to another store - but I'm not holding my breath after the whole Microsoft PlaysForSure debacle.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:44PM
Calibre requires an additional plugin to make that happen. And it is indeed an option if one doesn't mind technical breakage of DMCA.
I agree with you, Kobo makes the better choice for long-term survivability, likely. B&N is under fire on a lot of fronts (on the paper side of the store, plus all the paper products/bookends/cd's/games/etc. not fairing well either). I do with I'd gone with them longer-term. And I'm assuming their platform (like any other e-reader) would allow non-DRM content to be sideloaded.
I thought about getting a Kobo instead of the Nook at that time. Probably should have. And I'm sure Kobo will keep going if/when Walmart's idea goes down.
This sig for rent.